In my continuing quest for something more useful than the completely bankrupt "left-right" model, I bumped in this article describing a 3-axis political classification named "Vosem" (Russian for "eight", as in the eight octants of a cube). The three axes are cultural (freedom vs. control, or libertinism vs. puritanism), fiscal (nanny state or lack thereof), and corporate rights. Interesting idea, although it's pretty obvious where the author's own preferences lie, considering absolutely mind-bloggling statements such as "...similar to communism, except without the social freedom important to communist and socialist ideology" [sic!] I bet he doesn't know too many people who actually lived in a communist dystopia, or he wouldn't write such mindless dreck. Still, we seek the truth wherever we find it, and an interesting concept doesn't become less interesting because it is raised by a person whose politics I happen to abominate.
A personal confession is in order here. My own flirtation with Marxism was very brief: I quickly realized that it is the political equivalent of applying the Ideal Gas Law to a system under very high pressure. That is, something which looks very elegant on paper but is out of touch with reality. I then found something of a political home in European social-democracy of the old school, which is generally of a rather empirical bent and less preoccupied with doctrine than with concrete goals (workers' rights, cradle-to-grave welfare state,...) While some of these social-democrats were out-and-out anticommunist (just like Israel's founding father David Ben-Gurion), many others (including yours truly) fell to a greater or lesser degree for the "the extremists on our side are just pleasantly dotty" fallacy. To some extent, Europe was/is still licking its wounds from the Nazi era, and the crucial role played by the Red Army in bringing down the Nazi beast created a large "goodwill reservoir" among antifascists in Europe.
Judaism teaches there are three levels of knowledge: da`at or mere factual knowledge, bina or understanding (analytical insight), and hochma or wisdom (synthetic insight). [Hence the acronym "Habad" for the largest Hasidic movement.] I had always had the da`at of Communist monstrosity --- the grisly statistics of the Great Purges and the man-made famines. But it wasn't until I had a chance to converse at length with various people who had actually lived in Communist dystopias that I truly understood --- that I felt in my guts, so to speak --- that what many leftists considered "bugs" of the Communist system were actually its essential features. And that the conclusion followed that, if operationally rather than ideologically defined, Stalinism and Nazism were arguably two sides of the same revolting coin --- totalitarian statist collectivism.
Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine. Unlike some American self-declared "free speech fundamentalists", I can understand why Old Europe feels it needs laws banning neo-Nazi propaganda. What I do not understand is why propaganda for another form of democidal totalitarianism, with an even greater overall "body count", is somehow considered more respectable. And suddenly the American approach makes a good deal more sense.
UPDATE: the term "democidal" is no typo. "Genocide" refers to attempted annihilation of ethnic groups: "democide" is a more general term referring to mass killing on a genocidal scale, but not necessarily based on ethnic origin as a criterion. Wholesale killing of everybody with a college degree (Pol Pot-style), for instance, or mass killing of middle-class farmers ("kulaki"), would qualify as democide. So would six-and seven-figure mass executions of real and imaginary political opponents.
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