Talk:Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism

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Horribly biased, just like the documentary. First of all Fascism and National Socialism were not forms of socialism at all. Even the term "National Socialism" was not meant to be derived from actual socialism.


 * WOW...and they definately were.

A. Hitler and Mussolini both made alliances with private companies and wealthy industrialists, B. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were NOT command economies, far from it, and C. the ideological goal of the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis was never the creation of a classless society. These are all facts that oddly enough never made it into the documentary.

Another point, socialism has not "collapsed", again could not be further from the truth. Democratic socialist parties, very intent on redistributing wealth and battling exploitation have come to power in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere. Despite the ideological u-turn of social democrats (who are not and never have been socialists) during the 1990s, socialism in and of itself remains firmly alive and kicking.

And that brings me onto my third point, aside from using Fascism as an example of socialism which is horribly inaccurate, social democracy is also amazingly used as an example of socialism. Social democracy may have emerged from socialism, but as an ideology it is generally considered to be in a league of it's own.

Socialists seek to eventually end capitalism, create a classless society where the means of production are publicly owned. Social democrats, since the middle of the 20th century have sought to reform capitalism. I.e. generate wealth to create equal opportunities and basically create a mixed economy. Social Democracy as an ideology is also alive and well and is NOT socialism.

I hope that someone at least changes the wording of this article to remove the bias. POV is prohibited by wikipedia.

- Chris Gilmore

Unfortunately the simple description of this article (which is here made using the words of PBS itself) is biased, not a fault of the article but of Muravchik (recall, a former Socialist who is now a Neocon and is disgusted at his own former faith)'s book and the documentary. And the conclusion of the movie does open some room to the fact that socialism may just be reforming itself instead of plain extinguishing as the book originally stated (though they still ignore Chavéz, Morales, etc.). So if you must criticise the views in the article, you should actually start a criticism of the book and documentary section in the article itself as any debatable portion of the article which is just a description of the content of the Heaven on Earth series obliges us to warn people of the bias that are all over the documentary and book. So as you see the main point of the article is to describe the documentary. The issue of it being biased or not is a hole other matter (which I agree should be added as a Criticism of the film section), but no one ever claimed that this material is obviously factual, but this article just mentions the existence of movie/tv series and book. If Fahrenheit 9/11 (with just as much discussable material and POV) can have an article why not HOE? It just can't be presented as showing exact truth. But the fact is that the documentary/book says the things which you (and many historians and scholars) protest about, so this should be recorded side by side with critical and different views to warn people on the POV of the documentary (not of the article). Lususromulus (talk) 19:43, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

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