I don't think that pointing out that the fascists killed a whole bunch of trade unionists, in a discussion about fascist trade union policy, qualifies as "poisoning the well".
If Lenin had everyone who disagreed with him shot, he would have had his entire cabinet shot by mid-1918, including both Stalin and Trotsky.
Well, I disagree. Trade unions in the Soviet Union were subordinate to the state, but so was everything else: the army, the state-owned firms, the universities, the press. It would be ridiculous on the face of it to suggest that, say, the editor of Pravda, say, or the commander of the First Red Banner Army, was merely a ceremonial position, that he and his institution did not represent a location of power. The question of whether the trade unions had any real power would therefore be a question of whether they fulfilled an important role in organising Soviet society, and while readings from
Malleus Stalinicarum don't answer that question, but any credible scholarship will agree that the trade unions had an important role setting wages, deciding quotes, allocating workers, determining standards and imposing discipline. That this wasn't done entirely for the benefit of the workers doesn't reduce these institutions to mere puppets of Wicked Uncle Joe.
The activities of Western trade unions, social democratic and conservative, were not wholly for the benefit of the workers, either, giving their generally understood role as the guarantors of "industrial peace". (Even to this day, militant union leaders, like the late great Bob Crow of the British RMT, are regarded by the bourgeois press as economic vandals.) Still less so during war-time, when high degrees of central planning and "governments of national unity" gave Western democracies an appearance not unlike that of the Soviet Union, or Soviet-aligned "popular front" governments, under which the primary task of trade unions was seen as mobilising workers for the war effort, with severe official and unofficial penalties for failing to do so.
I've started to notice a second, sinister dimension to this particular conservative talking point this parodies. The overt usage, the one we're all familiar with, is that if the Nazis are socialists, then socialists are bad because they're like Nazis. That was good enough for the Obama era. But more recently, the concern seems less with identifying contemporary with socialism, as disidentifying fascism with the contemporary right.
The assertions, as those made up-thread, are that fascism pursued an essentially socialist economic program. One need not insist that this makes fascism and socialism interchangeable, and indeed one can generously permit that fascism is merely a
kind of socialism, or even that it was simply
informed by socialism. What's important is, if this is so, then nobody professing an explicitly capitalistic economic program can be a fascist. How can Trump be a fascist when he's a property mogul? How can Richard Spencer be a fascist if he's anti-welfare? How can that guy who started the Proud Boys be a fascist if he drinks his own piss, which I understand is in some way connected to low taxes? It may not convince leftists, but it doesn't have to: what matters is that moderate conservatives have bought just heavily enough into the conflation of fascism and socialism that they accept without much objection that an anti-socialist must be, by definition, at least
non-fascist, and therefore an acceptable ally. Even if you may find an individual alt-righter repugnant, even if you disagree with a specific slogan or talking point, they are not beyond the pale, they are
politically acceptable.
Which is kinda bleakly funny, given how this all went for conservatives last time.
"Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Rudy Giuliani too/Oh, the Night of the Long Knives is comin' for you." (nswf lyrics warning i guess)
