Introducing Fascism & Nazism

Rating:
Summary: Informative and entertaining introduction
Review: Fascism and Nazism have always seemed so horrific to me that I have put off learning about them. I picked up this book to get past that. It is a brief introduction to European and Japanese fascism that covers the basic history, philosophy, and politics of fascism in the 20th century. The stark black-and-white illustrations by Litza Jansz bring the book to life and are well integrated into Stuart Hood's text. The book covers the origins of fascism in the 19th century through to the re-emergence of neo-fascism at the dawn of the 21st century. This is a well-done entry in the Introducing series and recommended as a first book on the topic.

Rating:
Summary: A Chimera of history, facts and agenda...
Review: This book is clearly intelligent, ambiguous, misleading and often biased; it hides one untruth or undetermined truth as fact between every 4-5 facts. It is highly characterized and clearly an anti-neo-con publication, which I don't mind but wish it would be more factually supported. The illustration of Auswichtz while being a strong image metaphorically deserves more narrative description.

For the authors: I can't for the life of me understand your context on pg. 43 to: "the SA commander Ernst Roehm (1881-1934)was a homosexual." Is this meant to imply a transparency to the before-mentioned "radical socialist anti-capitalist" reference? Are you presenting this as the Nazi party's reasoning for a good moral excuse to kill him? I understand you wanting to show the Nazi distaste for so-called 'outsiders' or 'deviants' but this theme throughout the text seems overpresented as the guiding force of Nazism or Facism. There is no mention of the occultism of propaganda (i.e. Hess) and the reference to Riefenstahl is limited, only none of the comments seem to be presented objectively. No need to be a Nazi apologist, but an underlying left agenda seems to be present here in the text. As an "Introducing" title, less emotion and more facts would serve the book better. This text could and should be improved.

Rating:
Summary: "Fascism, Nazism & Socialism" by RexCurry.net
Review: Very informative and a historical reminder of how WWII began in 1939 when Poland was invaded by the National Socialist German Workers' Party and by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as allies in their scheme to divide up Eastern Europe.

Needs to deal more deeply with the fact that "Nazi" meant "National Socialist German Workers' Party." An easy way to remember that Nazis were self-proclaimed socialists is that the swastika resembles two "S" letters overlapping and the Nazis often used stylized "S" lettering in their symbols.

After it split from the National Socialist German Workers' Party during WWII, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics went on to kill even more people. The book neglects that fact.

WWII led to the Holocaust, and it led to the Wholecaust, in which hundreds of millions were slaughtered. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics killed 62 million; the People's Republic of China killed 35 million; and the National Socialist German Workers' Party killed 21 million (numbers from Professor R. J. Rummel's article in the Encyclopedia of Genocide). As the Journalist Rex Curry pointed out: Socialists are nuclear bombs. Socialism is nuclear war.

The book is a so-so reminder of the libertarian victory over socialism and over the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis) and in the ongoing struggle against socialism.