There seems to be some confusion on this board on this topic. I think the fact that these words have “ism” at the end that might be the source of this confusion.

Let’s be clear: Communism and Socialism are economic schemes. Socialism is the overtaxing parasite that weakens an economy and creates enough unemployment to fool people into thinking that free markets do not work (they do) and that the only way to stop the suffering is to give complete control of the marketplace to the government and let them control both production and distribution of everything we need (Communism).

That, of course, is a completely ridiculous and unsustainable economic scheme that only has a chance of working if you eliminate human nature and free will and everyone works to the very best of their capabilities merely to warrant the exact same reward as everyone around them, no matter how meager their individual efforts.

The practice of forcing people to go along with this scheme is known as fascism. Another way to say fascism is “force-ism” or, frankly, totalitarianism, dictatorship, etc. It’s essentially slavery. The closest thing we have to fascism in the united states is our prison system, where many rights are vastly curtailed, but honestly, American prisoners have more rights than people living in fascist regimes.

Here’s where the confusion comes in: Hitler was a fascist. He was because he was a dictator. But he was not a communist. He let business and trade go on as usual within germany but he was always watching and if he ever saw something he didn’t like or suspected anything or saw something he wanted for himself he would merely take it, kill or imprison whoever, etc. and nobody had any rights or legal recourse to oppose him.

Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were also fascist dictators, but they preached and tried to implement communism as their economic models. Of course they had to murder anyone who didn’t want to play ball and that’s exactly what they did.

But take note: communism needs fascism simply to be implemented because there will always be people who don’t want to play ball, so communist regimes are always fascist, but like Hitler, not all fascist regimes try to implement communism.

Fascism = dictatorship/totalitarianism. No rights. Only privileges at the behest of the person/people in charge.

Communism = an economic scheme that ignores human nature and never works and always results in economic collapse

Socialism = A wannabe dictatorship government overtaxing its citizens to fool them into thinking free markets don’t work and that Communism is the only way to eliminate poverty, crime, and suffering. “The Royal Road to Communism”

Take the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). They have communism in their name but they abandoned communism years ago. They’re still fascist though. They still control everyone, but they’ve embraced a kind of crony capitalism in order to survive economically. Thus, communists are always fascists but fascists are not always communists and sometimes even former communists (like China).

Another thing: when you think of left vs. right imagine a scale with totalitarianism/dictatorship/centralized one world government on the far left and complete anarchy with zero enforceable contracts or laws or anything on the extreme far right. We on this board believe that we should be free to do as we please as long as we don’t infringe on the rights of others and we do see a need for a neutral third party (government) who works for us (not us for them) to resolve disputes and prosecute crimes but that’s about it. Leftists want a welfare state where daddy government tells us what we can and can’t do and gives us what we need no questions asked.

All communists and fascists are leftists. Period.