What is fascism?

 What is Fascism? Good question.

 I used to maintain that the use of fascism to describe almost any American ideology or political party was wrong-headed or even offensive. I’ve started to use it myself, as I see fascist behavior rapidly increasing. The question comes to mind, what are we all talking about? Like most things that seem simple, it gets complicated real fast.

 First, let me get rid of the first objection that I sometimes here and find almost laughable. That is, the “you know, fascism only describes an Italian political movement in the first half of the 20^th century and you really shouldn’t use if for anything else” objection.

Nonsense. Yes, that’s where it came from, but even in Italy, what it meant morphed quickly. Go read Wikipedia if you want to see a history of that. It’s now a word – fascism, just like some people call me (wrongly) a Luddite, thinking I hate technology (I love technology that I love, but it is neutral – neither good nor bad in itself. What I hate is technology that is used for or tends to lead to making people more fearful or capable). In any event, when called a Luddite, I don’t say – “you know, Luddite only refers to groups of English workers who destroyed industrial machinery to protect their jobs,” because a secondary meaning, as with fascism, has arisen. We all know what it is, even if we can’t define it.

I have an easy way of doing this. I could post right her the ENTIRE essay the famous anti-authoritarian author George Orwell wrote on the meaning of fascism right here – because it is really short, but, though I usually ignore the average attention span when I write long posts, I’m trying not to these days for a number of reasons (foremost of which might be laziness). So here are his first and last three paragraphs, which really says it all:

“Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’

* * *

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”   

So, Orwell says that we usually mean by fascist, a bully, which is pretty good. I’m going to take his point that you can call pretty much anyone you don’t like of a certain type, whatever side of the political aisle he/she might be on. But, I think bully is just not enough, because while we usually hate bullies, we usually don’t get as angry, worried or or fearful when someone says here comes the bully, as we do when we say – here comes the fascist. It’s sort of like saying a kitty cat is a lion.

Here’s my definition of fascist: A fascist is someone who uses violence or the threat of violence to accomplish his or her political goals and to control others by those means, and it is most often accompanied by the victim’s self-identification with some allegedly oppressed or endangered group.

I think from there you can figure out what a fascist group, a fascist society or a fascist dictator is.

In other words, dear readers (that is the kind that always reads my posts to the end and isn't a spammer), the kid who asks you for money at the end of the lunch line, the politician who tells you that if you elect the other side it’s going to suck, and so on, are not fascists. Fascists are - even if they call themselves the opposite – the guys and gals who have been stopping free speech, accosting political figures in the street and in restaurants, tear down statues they don’t like, who take over the streets or block traffic or threaten to (or do) threaten to burn down buildings or our system.

And we know who that is in our society right now. No, don’t tell me that could describe those who marched in Selma or many other 1960s era civil rights advocates. They were actually oppressed. They reacted overwhelmingly, in general, with peaceful resistance, except some of them sometimes when threatened themselves.

Here’s the probably more important question. Are the young people of this country, so long proselytized by their educators, the media and now business, going to believe that they are fighting for truth, justice and the American way when they are gleefully watching some violently imposing their will on others? I hope not, but I don’t know. The last four years give me little confidence.

Sorry, ended it on a downer. How about this ending (based on the traditional “One thing we do know” grand finale) – “One thing we do know, our - 'Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor' are again at stake. "