re: Legacy of the British Empire

quote:

---

Pretty much all Central and Southern European countries became super progressive after WW2. They didn’t want to be affiliated with the legacy of the Nazi Party since they were all within close distance to Nazi occupied countries during the war. This includes Italy, Spain, Sweden, etc.

---

Wrong. Nazi is a contraction NSDAP - Translation is National SOCIALIST German Worker's Party. The origin of Italian and German Fascism was a leftist philosopher who thought Marx was only off in one respect - in Marxism, means of production are owned and controlled by the state. In Fascism, means of production are privately held by a few individuals and controlled by the state.

This same system effectively prevails in Europe to this day. Look into how closely held the EU stock exchanges are by their super rich. There are no masses of stock-owning 401k's owned by Freidrich Lunchbox or Pierre Bluecollar. Some of the world's largest companies are either state-owned in whole, in part, or are completely privately held by people very close to the governments - VW, Schaeffler Group, Bosch, Fiat until very recently, BMW, ZF, the list goes on.

Fascism considered itself to be the happy medium between Communism and the "Decadent Democracy" of the West, primarily the British Empire and the US at the time. What you have there now is fascism (little "f") without the industrialized murder camps and armies trying to build empires. Rebuilding after WWII was just an excuse to set all of the socialism in stone that had begun prior to the war. As France was falling to the German Blitzkrieg in 1940, one of France's leading generals stated "Look at what socialism has done to my country!" regarding the socialist government "reforms" that had neutered the French military in the interwar period.