What is Fascism, anyhow?

“Like all sound political conceptions”, Benito Mussolini wrote, “Fascism is action and it is thought”. He also stated that “Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism”. Although Mussolini coined the term in 1915 and wrote many a rambling description of it with the help of Giovanni Gentile, people have struggled to define it succinctly. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall”

But in action, Fascism is observed to be a centralized authoritarian government led by a “strong man” type that suppresses free speech and other freedoms or liberties in service to a specific dogmatic vision for a country’s progress; where business interests almost always overrule the needs of the people. A fascist regime typically scapegoats a few classes of people within the country that they blame for all the country’s problems.

In thought, Fascism is the acceptance of that scapegoating as fact, and by building up one class of people as “superior” over the others the populace can be distracted from noticing their exploitation by corporate interests.

There are some who are genuinely confused, because Hitler referred to his political fascist structure as National Socialism. And there are others who know the difference between National Socialism and Marxist Socialism but choose to conflate the two to downplay their own Nazi ideologies.

The facts are thus: Hitler renamed the as NSDAP – Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. The National Socialist German Worker’s Party. This was cynical political theater to win the votes of socialists in early 1930s Germany. Political parties and regimes often give themselves contradictory names, like Canada’s Progressive Conservatives or North Korea calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

But among the heaps of evidence that the Nazis weren’t socialist is that once the Nazis were in power, the socialists were among the first groups that the Nazis persecuted.

And Nazis weren’t leftist as they are widely recognized as the OG far right. While Hitler attacked both the far left and the pre-Nazi far right in Mein Kampf, he also claimed that Germany lost the Great War because the leadership under the Kaiser was so inept – ignoring that the Allies kicked the snail snot out of Germany and it couldn’t stay in the fight. He further wrote how people could be induced to believe colossal lies because they would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.

Tags: