What is fascism ? Will saying the word provoke its coming about ? Is using the term "crying wolf ?" Wild eyed radicalism ? Maoism ? ultra-Revolutionary irresponsibilism ? Foolish ? Stupid ? Naïve ? Childish ? Unscholarly ?
Is illegal war making critical to the definition of fascism ?
What class analysis is critical to understanding fascism ? All historical fascist regimes were capitalist.
What is the role of big lies in fascism ?
In the U.S. Smith Act prosecutions were initiated under Roosevelt and Truman , Democrats. The U.S.'s blockade caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children's which were acceptable to a Democratic Secretary of State .The Korean war crime against peace by the U.S. was perpetrated by a Democratic President . As was the Viet Nam War in the main. Jim Crow was the system of Southern Democrats. The Palmer Raids were under Wilson's Democratic administration. U.S. fascist tradition has plenty of Democratic participation. The fascistic aspects of the U.S. system are bipartisan. Democrats today are complicit in fascist acts by the U.S. The idea that anti-fascist struggle today is shilling for the Democratic Party is a red herring , and is itself based on an infantile leftist,dogmatic assessment of U.S. bourgeois party history.
Part of fascism was that it used the highest industrial force in history at that time in the mode of destruction, and war industry. WWI had industrial strength killing, but WWII had more force because of the advances in physics in the interim as applied to armaments.
Fascism because of its militarism must be defined in part through a measure of the force, literal physical force and power, available to the state. The U.S. regime has many orders of magnitude more of force and power available for use than all historic fascist regimes.
( see nuclear weapons); even short of nuclear weapons, the U.S. military might is much greater than that of the Nazis or any other historical fascist regime. The U.S. is more potentially dangerous than the historical fascist nations because of this.
Critical to most definitions of fascism is anti-communist ideology of fascists. My goodness, we haven't even touched on the essential role of racism in fascist ideology. Was the South African Apartheid system fascist ? Has there ever been a fascism of lighter peoples over darker peoples in history ? Name one. If your list of fascist regimes or fascistic episodes doesn't include one of these, then your definition of fascism is in trouble, under severe suspicion. When racists annihilate an entire town of Black people in Florida, is that fascistic ? Or just "authoritarian" 'cause the U.S. can't have fascism and to use the word is imprecise in that case.
Is it important to have fascist ideology circulating in the market place of ideas ? Is forcing noxious doctrine underground better or worse than releasing it "into the air" ? Does freedom of fascist speech and organization increase or decrease the freedom in society ?
Lets look at the matter a bit more closely.
CB
^^^^^^
>From wikipedia:
Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, was the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. Similar political movements, including Nazism, spread across Europe between World War I and World War II.
The most restrictive definitions of fascism include only one government, that of Mussolini in Italy. However, the term is frequently applied to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and is used to refer to similar regimes and movements across Europe in the same time period, such as Hungary's Arrow Cross, Romania's Iron Guard, Spain's Falange, and the French political movements led by Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot. More broadly, it is sometimes (by both supporters and opponents) applied to other authoritarian regimes of the period such as those of Imperial Japan under Hideki Tojo, Austria under Engelbert Dollfuss and Greece under Ioannis Metaxas. Its use for similar but longer-lived regimes such as Spain under Francisco Franco and the Estado Novo of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal is widespread among opponents of those regimes but is often disputed by their supporters. This trend toward the term being used only by opponents is amplified in the case of more recent authoritarian regimes such as Indonesia under Suharto, and Chile under Augusto Pinochet.
Although the broadest definitions of fascism may include every authoritarian state that has ever existed, most theorists see important distinctions to be made. Fascism in Italy arose in the 1920s as a mixture of syndicalist notions with an anti-materialist theory of the state; the latter had already been linked to an extreme nationalism. Fascism in many ways seems to have been clearly developed as a reaction against Communism and Marxism, both in a philosophic and political sense, although it opposed democratic capitalist economics along with socialism, Marxism, and liberal democracy. It viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect collective and individual rights, or as one that should be held in check. It tended to reject the Marxist notion of social classes (and universally dismissed the concept of class conflict), embracing nationalism and mysticism, and advancing ideas of strength and power as means of legitimacy, a might makes right that glorified war as an end it itself and determinant of truth and worthiness. An affinity to these ideas can be found in Social Darwinism. These ideas are in direct opposition to the ideas reason or rationalism characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment, from which liberalism and, later, Marxism would emerge.
Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production. Fascism exalts the nation, state, or race as superior to the individuals, institutions, or groups composing it. Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, often to the point of a cult of personality.
Fascism attracted political support from diverse sectors of the population, including big business, farmers and landowners, nationalists, and reactionaries, disaffected World War I veterans, intellectuals such as Gabriele D'Annunzio, Curzio Malaparte and Martin Heidegger to name a few, conservatives and small businessmen, and the poor to whom they promised work and bread.
The word has become a slur throughout the political spectrum since the failure of the Axis powers in World War II, and it has been extremely uncommon for any political groups to call themselves "fascist" since 1945. In contemporary political discourse, adherents of some political ideologies tend to associate fascism with their enemies, or define it as the opposite of their own views. There are no major self-described fascist parties or organizations anywhere in the world.