In preparation for a new anthology I have coming out later this year, which will be available in all formats, I just created a hardback edition of its companion volume. So if you want a complete set of my anthologies in hardback, you can start collecting now!
The old book coming into hardback is Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995–2013 (2014). You can now select a “hardback” option to buy there. It’s pricier (as hardbacks always are) and it isn’t replacing the paperback (so you can still get that, and at the original price despite inflation!). But the fancier option is now available.
That old volume contains all my peer reviewed articles (and magazine articles) in the subject of history, plus a few research papers and other articles of relevance, and updates and epilogues for the other stuff. I have more peer reviewed articles in history coming but it will be years before there is enough for another anthology for it all (though eventually there may be one, making a third volume).
The new book coming in all editions will be From Ontology to Morality: The Philosophical Papers of Richard Carrier 1996–2025 (2026). That will be the same kind of thing, only it will contain all of my peer reviewed articles to date in the subject of philosophy (rather than history), again with some updates and epilogues.
That will also contain two new articles available nowhere else: “Is Philosophy Stupid?” which turns my slides and lecture notes into a coherent (and more up to date) essay; and “The Ontology of Absolutely Everything,” which will be my first-ever concise survey of how physicalism explains all known facts (including the ontology of logic, qualia, morality, beauty, abstractions, propositions, and everything else), written with updated precision and academic rigor, and citations to concurring academic studies.
I’ll say more when that book comes out (it will get its own announcement on my blog) but with all my academic papers together like that, I realize now that From Ontology to Morality will amount to the most thorough refutation of theism that I have ever published. It will work well as a companion to my new edition of Sense and Goodness without God (which will be re-titled A Better World without God to distinguish it), and I hope to have that available by end of this year or early next.
But From Ontology to Morality is primarily a companion volume to Hitler Homer Bible Christ—one with all my peer reviewed papers in philosophy; the other, history—and they are designed to look similar and thus fit together on a bookshelf. So if you want them both in hardback, you can get a start now by getting HHBC that way, in anticipation of getting FOM that way!
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Any news on the Sense & Goodness update?
As noted in the article above, it’s in progress and should be out late this or early next year. And as noted, it will have a new title.
Apologies, I missed that!
Good keg. I’ll add it to my latest Amazon basket. The PB isn’t quite falling apart yet; but it is well thumbed and I’ll regulary point someone at one paper or another. Money well spent.
I have really appreciated your writings on moral philosophy, I think my views are pretty similar to yours, i.e I am a Utilitarian, I think morality can´t be thought of as existing in the abstract or just appeals to intuition, but what will actually benefit you according to the way you are constituted as a human being living in society, which tends to be what will benefit others.
I think one very important consequence of your approach, is when it comes to whether universal approaches to moral issues are correct or particularist ones. I think there is a fair amount of confusion among people about the difference between particularism (the view that morality depends on circumstances) and moral anti-realism (the view there is no morality).
It seems to me that under your version of utilitarianism, the most logical view is that neither strong particularism nor strong universalism are true. This is at the end, an empirical question of applying your philosophy to real world data.
For example, you can have societies that are quite different, but which actually function pretty well for the people in them. Dutch and Korean societies are quite different, yet they´re both pretty good countries, as places go, the Netherlands is more individualistic, Korea is more collective, both of which have advantages and disadvantages, i.e people are less likely to respect stupid government decisions in the Netherlands, but also less likely to obey wise ones, i.e anti-Covid regulations (there´s a lot of interesting social psychology research on these differences).
The Korean government intervenes a lot to keep unemployment low, the Netherlands has a big comprehensive welfare state. They both have big difficulties too, i.e Korea has a massive stress epidemic from long working hours and few holidays and can be a bit inward looking as a country. The Netherlands, has a lot of creative ideas flowing around, because of the mix of contact with other cultures and ideas and trade with other nations, however the Netherlands has more ethnic tensions than Korea and there´s less of an idea of a joint purpose as a nation (I don´t think it´s immigrants’ fault, so much as they’ve been scapegoated and poor management of migration).
They are however, both functional liberal democracies, even when crazy people get into power (the far right-conservative coalition in the Netherlands, and the recent far right president in Korea), democracy has remained pretty well intact, as have people´s civil rights.
I think that we can see in these examples, some things they share that make both countries good places to live (they are democracies, they look after their people, albeit in different ways), but also aspects of the society are a double edged sword and have big advantages and disadvantages. We wouldn´t want to make Koreans give up their collectivist culture, as it has big advantages in some situations, but the same is true for the Dutch and their individualism. It´s also enjoyable to live in a diverse world in my opinion. You can debate which one is a nicer country and it perhaps depends on your individual personality, but they are both pretty good places.
However, there´s no doubt that these two countries are both much better off than say India or Pakistan, which are not really functional liberal democracies, which don´t look after their own citizens’ welfare very well, where religious extremism is a very real problem.
I think it´s kind of like with food. Generally, there are foods which are popular for a reason, i.e Indian food, Chinese food, Japanese food and Italian food are popular because of how our taste buds work, and they´re all significantly different and you could argue which one of them is better. However, I think few people would say Dutch food was their favourite cuisine (it’s not bad, just not super-exciting).
To be clear, I am not a utilitarian. I’m a hybrid consequentialist. The nearest subcategory you could place my moral theory in is desire utilitarianism. But that’s simply because desire utilitarianism isn’t traditional utilitarianism either but a hybrid consequentialism.
My theory subsumes deontological and virtue ethics as well. See Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same. For my debate with a desire utilitarian see Goal Theory Update (though that is over a decade old and thus has many obsolete elements; my newer work supersedes everything there).
On the idea of commensurate ideal systems, one of the few correct ideas Sam Harris ever had was Landscape Theory, which I agree with (and attentive readers will notice I account for it without naming it in my latest peer-reviewed study, Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes; but for an explicit discussion see Epilogue to the Sam Harris Moral Facts Contest). A mundane but illustrative example is left-side- vs. right-side-drive traffic systems (UK vs. US for example): both are equally good, and no system is better, but you do have to pick one. This is itself a universal rule (“either system A or B is the best system”). This is a function of how all moral facts can be universalized in a language like Game Theory without dependence on particulars but adaptability to particulars.
So every particular is just a condition for a different universal rule. I give more examples in my Religions study.
Also, P.S., Hitler Homer doesn’t go into moral theory; it’s all history papers. But all my peer-reviewed papers in philosophy (and many are indeed in moral philosophy) will be in its companion volume to be published later this year, From Ontology to Morality, as discussed above.
Sure, I was thinking about Sense and Goodness and your papers on moral ontology, which you mentioned. Thanks for the clarification r.e your moral stance, I had you down classified as a preference utilitarian, which is close to what I think. I think that we can incoporate lots of insights from psychology, i.e Maslow´s hierarchy, in order to work out how we can maximise human wellbeing.
One thing that I think is interesting for consequentialists, and this is absolutely not a new debate, is the issue of human rights. I think they are well founded on consequentialist ethics, unlike someone like Jeremy Bentham, if we think of them as principles that societies need to guarantee human wellbeing. I.e we know that we need academic freedom for scientific progress and we need freedom of political expression so we can have our ideas criticised and cultural freedom of expression so people can produce new, interesting art forms to stimulate our senses and I think they are discoverable principles.
I guess one issue is on that view, whether or not you can say human rights belong to individuals as such, or that they should mainly be thought of as “good rules to have for society”. I also wonder if there´s any real difference in practice between positive and negative rights, as we can see them both as principles that a decent form government should provide to make sure its citizens are content and you can´t have freedom of speech, unless the government will stop angry mobs harassing people for merely having different views.
Just to be clear, I dislike the label “a preference utilitarian” or anything using the word “utilitarian” because of the baggage fallacy: too much emotional baggage is attached to that word that people bring along with it anytime they hear it. I am a consequentialist. So if you are using utilitarian as a synonym of consequentialism, then you should just say consequentualism and not drag in the baggage of utilitarianism. And if you are using utilitarianism as a subset of consequentialism, you are no longer describing my moral theory. So it’s best to just ditch the word “utilitarianism.” It’s too dysfunctional a word for the purpose.
As to:
Human rights are a legal instrument and thus invented by humans as a tool for a purpose.
The moral justification of doing that can be spoken of figuratively in a way that sounds like rights are inherent in moral philosophy (even I have done that in the past), but that produces another baggage fallacy that (depending on context) might be best to avoid.
Rights are a downstream product of moral philosophy (belonging to ethics in relation to politics), not an organizing premise of it (belonging to metaethics). In my Religions paper I have an aside on the role of “duties” in ethical theory in contrast to imperatives; “rights” are just a subset of duties: a duty of respect for the right) necessary for human wellbeing. They can be contrasted with privileges as things not necessary but helpful, where we get a wider landscape (many different incommensurate systems of privileges are equally good, but only one system (or at most a scant few systems) of rights is maximally good because that is true by definition (we are defining rights as those privileges that are necessary and thus less negotiable, which necessarily greatly narrows the number of systems with commensurate peaks on the landscape but incommensurate implementation).
Think “right of way” in traffic systems: there are really only two or a few systems that work, and you have to pick one. That’s necessity in relation to functioning traffic, but that is derivative of having a complex enough system to even have traffic, and derivative of the more basic rights that system is designed to protect (like life and property).
I think the formal literature is aware that negative rights entail certain positive rights, at minimum that the state must positively intervene, and thus provide goods and services, to protect negative rights (otherwise negative rights don’t meaningfully exist). Though often it’s overlooked just how extensive that is or even should be the case, e.g. Libertarians tend to forget that their entire idealized system fails unless the state pays for everyone’s lawyers and legal expenses, for example (a “welfare” policy they would howl and rage at even though it is logically entailed by their own ideology).
That doesn’t eliminate the distinction being made between negative and positive rights. But it does eliminate any armchair insistence that there is some blanket reason only negative rights should exist. If protecting life and property from interference (negative rights) requires positive rights (the state giving people stuff at someone else’s expense), and it does, then there is no longer any coherent reason to stop at police and courts. You now have just given a Libertarian justification for firefighters, food security insurance, national healthcare, even universal basic income. Libertarianism collapses under the incoherence of its own ideas. Taken seriously, and rigorously kept coherent, it ends up producing a standard progressive society, whereby state enterprises are just contracted public corporations with their own bylaws.
One example of which (which pisses them off to have pointed out to them, and they will desperately resort to specious and convoluted apologetics to try and escape) is “government regulations” (see Sic Semper Regulationes): any outcome that Libertarianism entails one could sue for after the fact is thereby justified in the state preventing before the fact. A complete regulatory state ensues.
I think that’s a really helpful response that has cleared plenty of things up for me, thanks for taking the time to write it, in terms of what you think, how you frame your philosophical views.
When I talk about human rights, if people ask me whether I believe in them, I do tend to say yes, along the lines you’re saying and I do think human rights instruments in laws and constitutions are definitely a good thing to have and I do believe in them, I guess I just think they’re a bit different to how they`re often framed in rhetoric.
R.e Libertarians (both the socialist and the capitalist variants) I think they’ve basically got the wrong species for their ideologies. Maybe even any intelligent species would not be able to get it to work. There are libertarian socialist societies, but they’re basically hunter gatherer communities and it’s not that they don’t have rules, they do, very strict ones, they just enforce them differently and they’re not written in legal charters.
For any large scale society, it’s impossible to get it to work imo, it depends on a vision of humanity not prone to tribal violence, or where specialised knowledge isn’t needed (I don’t see how you could run power stations in that kind of society).
When it comes to Libertarian capitalism, I think you’re very right. You can’t have a functioning justice system unless there are state subsidised lawyers for less well-off citizens. In the UK atm, this is a huge issue as legal aid has been massively cut over the last 16 or so years and it’s the biggest single threat to a right to a fair trial in the country.
Talking about social rights and their development,one thing it’s worth noting too was that in the UK the state primary education system was created in the 1870s under William Gladstone i.e Mr free trade, free markets himself. He was initially reluctant, but he was persuaded that it was necessary for any free society to function that the people were educated to some degree and also, the Prussians (soon to become the German Empire) had done it and they were industrialising super fast and decided it might be a good idea to follow suit.
All true, except one point that only furthers your point when corrected:
Hunter-gatherer societies are not libertarian; they are fundamentally communist. Everyone works for the group, and everyone partakes of its products (food, tools, labor, parenting). In fact they could not survive in the wild otherwise. Libertarians usually dismiss them, therefore, as lifeboat scenarios that civilization ended the need of. Which simply isn’t true. Civilization sustained the need of it, but did create room (and necessity) for greater freedoms as a lever of progress and productivity. Libertarians just forget about the former and obsess over the latter (with armchair fantasies that never connect to any well-tested reality or its indispensable context).
Yeah, I agree with that. When I said “libertarian socialist”, I meant basically how someone like Noam Chomsky would use the term, i.e to mean socialism but without a state.
I guess “communism” is just a synonym, in effect.
One problem on the left is that we have a very unclear vocabulary at times. To some (probably most people these days) “communism” means Stalinism, to others it basically means what Marx meant, i.e a society with no state per se, where people basically self organise and everything is shared and I think “anarchism” in left circles basically means the same thing, but that you don’t believe in Marx’s theory of history.
It’s definitely a huge issue when trying to explain our ideas. I happily use “social-democrat” and “socialism” interchangeably, because I think social democracy is a variant of socialism and most socialist thinkers haven’t been for out and out abolition of markets (Marx is just the most famous).
The issue is that if I say I’m a socialist, lots of people believe that I want to nationalise literally everything, whereas I think that something like a Scandinavia +, where Tony Benn (left wing Labour MP in the UK) wanted to go is what I actually believe in.
Mottos like “socialism without a state” I think are a joke. It is literally impossible to have any functioning system without a government. And a government is a state.
Government was invented precisely to solve the problem of lawless chaos, and organize collective action successfully. Whether you call a government a “state” or not is semantics. You can’t change what a thing is by changing what you call it.
But yes. Hybrid economies are equilibrium-seeking economies and thus obey the same laws as ecosystems—and are thus the only actually stable form of collective organization, i.e. “government.” See How Far Left Is Too Left?
I agree with you that it’s impossible to get it to work in a large scale society at any rate, and I agree with you, I think at the end of the day any sophisticated form of organisation is a kind of government and I do think any functioning kind of government does need enforcement mechanisms of some kind otherwise you’ll never get anything done.
I think what early socialists aimed for, like Robert Owen, like Marx, like Proudhomme, without some kind of central government you would essentially go back to having lots of small little tribes and the difficulties that brings (i.e tribal warfare can be nastier than wars between big nations, Jared Diamond´s book has some really illustrative examples).
I liked your article “How far left is too left”, I found myself agreeing with it. I think it’s important for the European left and the US left to learn from each other’s successes and failures. I think many people on the left in Europe think that the best way to stop fascism is to ban fascist ideas and it’s been a dismal failure. For starters, the fascist parties can always just say “we’re not actually fascists” and it’s kind of hard for courts to get involved in debates like that. There’s the whole issue of undermining your own values and often things like anti-semitism laws have been turned on the left. They also don’t seem to work very well at denting fascist movements, i.e the RN in France have a good chance of winning the presidency.
R.e presentation it’s definitely a big issue, I think one thing David Pakman said which is true is that in a sense right wing ideas are easier for people to understand, they appeal to people´s gut instincts more. It’s one reason why in most liberal democracies, right wing parties have won most of the elections.It means we have to be especially careful about how we present things and take people along with us.
About Hitler, Homer, Bible Christ. It’s one of the few things of yours I haven´t read, I’ve followed a lot of your blog posts, I have a copy of OHJ and Sense and Goodness.
What is certain, is that I can´t think of a single fascist regime which has actually been atheist. I´m using fascist in the standard sense of the word , to mean the ultra-right, extreme nationalist regimes in the 20s and 30s ((there are legit arguments that Juchism is a form of fascism, it’s a totalitarian ideology anyway). There’s the case of Positive Christianity with the Nazis, and of course Mussolini’s deal with the pope, and the other fascist regimes tended to be even more explicitly religious, i.e Franco in Spain (and the most fascist secton of the regime, the Falangists were ultra-catholic), Tiso in Croatia, Vichy France, Japan under Tojo/Hirohito and the neo-Shintoism they created.
In much of Europe now, the far right is pretending to be less religious than it is and there have been some interesting arguments, a bit like Trump´s conflicts with the Pope. The far right party in Spain, Vox, have recently attacked the Catholic church in Spain, as the Catholic church has not much choice but to have a somewhat pro-migration stance given that lots of churchgoers these days are Latino immigrants, religioisity among the Spanish born population is about where it is in the rest of Western Europe.
In France, interestingly, Macron recently successfully reformed the constitution to include abortion rights and one reason I think he did this was 1) to prevent a far right govt (which is now a real possibility) from banning them, 2) to actually try to increase divisions within the far right and force Le Pen to show her hand on what she thinks on the issue. Le Pen herself, voted for the reform, but some of her MPs didn´t.
You might be surreptitiously defining the USSR and Maoist China out of the category of “fascist” here.
I think they definitely count. Again, at least as totalitarian. But there are too many analogs to standard fascism to discount, it just manifests differently.
While the USSR was more dependent on the Russian Orthodox Church than is usually said, it was officially atheist and even used atheism as a shibboleth to test warranted access to power. But this was mostly a facade. There was very little actual commitment to the idea and it did essentially replace God with the State, and thus is not representative of “atheism” generally, but of an actually fringe and bizarre atheist religion.
All the same can be said of China.
I think the common feature is religious extremism, where we define religion as not belief in the supernatural but absolute faith in any singular system of dogmas and mythologies adherence to which (or at least lip service to which) dictates, by explicit state action, what level of privilege you will have in a society. Plato’s Republic works as a manual for fascism regardless of whether the Mythology that the Guardians protect has any gods in it.
This is why we should speak not of atheism (there are too many toxic and evil varieties of atheism) but Secular Humanism (which neither the USSR nor China can honestly claim). It is not enough to persuade people to be atheists. You need to also get them into an evidence-based worldview that ensures they will be sane, reasonable, and good.
It depends if you use “fascist” as just a synonym of totalitarian or not, I think you tend to use it as a synonym of totalitarian from what I have read of your writings. The USSR was definitely totalitarian by the Stalin era for sure, I think only a conspiracy theorist can deny that.
As you know, the definition of fascism is debated in political theory, as is what regimes count as fascist. I tend to use it in a fairly standard way, to mean right wing, ultra-nationalist, totalitarian regimes, often accompanied by a “reactionary modernism”, i.e an idea that they’re modernising society but with a very reactionary bent, i.e their vision of modernism included eliminating traditional enemies, creating new versions of lost empires. There’s also a strong hatred of socialism and that different social classes should exist, but work together for the benefit of the nation.
I think it’s different from the earlier absolute monarchies in Europe, for example, in that they didn’t rely on mass mobilisation of the public and indoctrinating them with nationalist sentiment, (not until some of them decided to ride the nationalist wave later anyway). That was kind of the case with Imperial Japan, which arguably was a kind of absolute monarchy that ended up adopting fascism gradually from above, rather than below.
I’d say Stalinist regimes have differences in terms of when they tend to come to power, i.e often after an attempted socialist revolution (i.e the Soviet Union, Vietnam) and they often emerge out of the revolutionary army, whereas fascist regimes often emerged in opposition to it (Hitler and Mussolini being the most famous cases, Franco too).
I think also there are differences in terms of how they operate. Stalinist regimes tend to at least oficially claim to be against the class system and they claimed to want to create a socialist society and I think that did shape how people were educated in Stalinist societies, there was a real effort to eliminate illiteracy and also get people from families with no history of education to go to university.
I think overall the Stalinist regimes did invest more in their people’s wellbeing too and I think that’s due to their socialist ideology and origins. They improved the housing stock in Eastern Europe a lot, and also the leisure facilities available in cities. That´s not to say fascist regimes never invested in these things (Franco did in the 60s and 70s), but on the whole I think Stalinist regimes invested in this more.
There is also the fact that Stalinist regimes tended to have planned economies, whereas fascist regimes did not (indeed, Hitler actually privatised some companies when he came to power and the Nazis were quite reluctant to nationalise things until the war) and Mussolini when he came to power initially was pro-privatisation too. I think that´s to do with Stalinist regimes on the whole wanting to disrupt the class system heavily, whereas fascist regimes on the whole don´t want that.
Another big difference is that Stalinist regimes at least have tended to keep up a pretence of wanting a community of nations, for the USSR of course that meant in practice keeping the Warsaw pact nations in its zone of influence. I don´t think you can say that about Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Of course, Stalinist regimes can use nationalist and racist rhetoric when it suits them, i.e the USSR and Poland were both antisemitic (very thinly disguised) to give one example.
At the end of the day, they are both systems that are authoritarian (with all the things that tends to bring, i.e high military spending, surveillance) and I do think that oppressing people into being socialists or conservatives is definitely the wrong way to go. I´d call myself a very left wing social democrat and I think one problem Lenin and Trotsky suffered from (leaving aside for now the debate about whether they intended to construct an authoritarian state), is that they were arrogant and dismissive of real things that the Liberal democracies of the West had achieved and I think it´s turned out to be true that the Politburo structure is not a good way to run a country in the long run.
I agree with you too, that it´s important to be a secular humanist and ideologies have a lot of the same flaws of religion and run on basically the same kinds of cognitive biases. I think you’re absolutely right about that, and it’s a huge problem, i.e lots of Green parties have their heart in the right place on the environment, but they reject nuclear power out of hand.
Semantic quibbling is idle, though. The substantive point is that these distinctions don’t matter to any point you were making. And you’ve only confirmed that again.
It’s thus not worth the bother of correcting all your erroneous facts, e.g., the Nazi regime was all about centralized organization of everything, including industry, as its entire mantra was that everything must serve the interests of the state; hell they literally had a Central Planning Board and whole dissertations analyze how similar Hitler’s scheme was to Stalin’s—that they used private incentive systems to reward loyalists is no different than how every other country does it (including China).
Only soviet-style communist states (like the USSR) did not have that, but they used central committee appointments to reward loyalism, recreating essentially the same thing. This is why when the USSR fell, Russia and the Warsaw states dissolved into kleptocracies: because they were already being run by private oligarchs positioned to just claim to own the things they were assigned.
I realise I said something that was misleading (not intentionally) :
“There is also the fact that Stalinist regimes tended to have planned economies, whereas fascist regimes did not (indeed, Hitler actually privatised some companies when he came to power and the Nazis were quite reluctant to nationalise things until the war) and Mussolini when he came to power initially was pro-privatisation too. I think that´s to do with Stalinist regimes on the whole wanting to disrupt the class system heavily, whereas fascist regimes on the whole don´t want that.”
What I meant by this is that fascist regimes maintained private property and private ownership of capital, not that they didn´t use central planning at all, they certainly did, I think pretty much all modern capitalist economies use it to some degree. It’s true that they thought that everyone should be subordinate to the state, absolutely no disagreements there, I expressed myself badly.
It´s worth noting too that privatisation isn’t the opposite of increasing the power of the state, the Nazis sold the early industries they privatised to supporters and it´s not opposite to central planning either, as I mentioned in the response to another post below central planning is used in agriculture in the present day EU and very much used in the weapons industry. There as a central planning board, which was created during the war (1942). The Nazis of course had four-year plans too.
As for Stalinist states, they certainly did create a nomenclature and what you say about the top level of the party being in a ripe position to become capitalist oligarchs, that’s definitely true, a lot of post-Soviet/Warsaw pact politicians are literally the same people.
I don’t think the differences between the regimes are just semantics however. I think the way regimes portray themselves ideologically can create real differences in the mentalities of the population.
I think too that although the Soviet Union ended up creating its own class system in effect, I think the socialist origins of the regime did shape its policy (and that of the other Warsaw pact states). For example, Nazi Germany was the only fascist state to actually have a universal healthcare system and they basically just kept the Bismarckian one, whereas all the Warsaw pact states did create one (granted, it was often quite corrupt and you could pay to have queue jumps). Neither Franco, nor Mussolini bothered creating one at all.
That all seems like irrelevant semantics and trivia to me.
Maybe go back up thread and reconnect with what we were talking about.
I guess you’re emphasising overall that what these regimes had in common was that they indoctrinated people with ideologies that could not be questioned and these ideologies functioned as their state religion, as well as the state being above all.
I agree with that, I think that’s clearly true and you’re right there’s plenty of comparative work in history about the differences and similarities between Stalinism and fascism (mainly between Stalinism and Nazism), i.e Richard Overy and Ian Kershaw have done a lot of work on this and there are definitely big similarities, though I would argue that there are significant differences.
I’d say that the right wing regimes that emerged during the 20s and 30s on the whole all kept traditional religion (albeit in a warped version, i.e positive Christianity, Imperial Shintoism) as well as having a new cult of the leader and of the state and the churches tended to keep a lot of their privileges as institutions.
The Stalinist regimes tended to do away with the institutional privileges of the traditional religions (like they did with the original class system) and often tried to do away with them themselves although of course they didn’t replace them with terribly healthy mentalities, i.e still a culture of non-thinking and not all of them had bad relations with the church (Ceaucescu being one case). As you say, in effect Marxism-Leninism became the state religion.
I’d happily apply the lable “totalitarian” too to both, I think it’s mostly a 20th century phenomenon (Sparta might be a counter-example), that you get when you have new ideologies, the idea of mass participation in politics, the percieved failure of liberal democracy to deliver for the masses, the left/right divide. They’re both quite different to absolute monarchies in that regard.
Realize the term “far right” is dialectical. It probably shouldn’t be used. Nazism was actually far left in origin via social nationalism. Building socialism in one country. Add in the Thule order’s freemasonry like esoterism, you get what the Nazis became. Fabians were the softer, more classically liberal influenced people who saw laws as a mean for improving living standards. Hitler saw them weak, bourgeois puppets.
Bobby, Nazis literally sat on the right side of parliament, Marxists on the left. That is the origin of those words.
You need to stop listening to disinformation and start studying the actual history of these things from legitimate sources.
The Nazis were not far left at all in any sense of the term. Indeed, they got into power precisely because the German right, the reactionaries and the Conservatives did a deal with them. Also, one thing that´s amazing is just how anti-nationalisation of industry the Nazis were, even when conservatives at that time (we´re not in the neoliberal era in the 20s and 30s) in Europe actually quite often accepted it.
Hitler and Mussolini actually privatised industries when they came to power.
Also, all existing capitalist countries use forms of central planning, it’s not something that makes them “left wing”, the way agriculture works in the US and EU is quite heavily centrally planned in practice, the same with military industries. It´s very state directed, the thing is the profits go to the wealthy rather than being invested in social goods (a bit of a generalisation I know, but I think it’s more or less true).