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Fascism: A Quick Note
According to George Orwell, whom I am inclined to regard as close enough:
Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in American magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not Fascism is a form of capitalism. But still, when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini’s Italy, we know broadly what we mean.
My own working definition of Fascism, based upon reading significant early chapters of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, is a government which, failing to fall neatly into another category, seeks a relationship with children at the expense of those children’s relationship with their parents. Well, it’s been a decade, so we’ll see. Unimaginable, right?
Rather than being a “form of capitalism” (whatever ‘capitalism’ is), I figure that fascism can only arise in a market economy, but does not exist while a free market still exists. The term “Capitalist” is as justified as the term “Anasazi,” and just as welcome by those so called.
To me, it seems that Communism and Fascism are two heresies of Socialism, complete with big government power over everything it wants, including religion, industry, policy, markets, family, education, and so forth. Communism has no religion or markets, whereas Fascism does; Fascism on the other hand, has no alternative religion — rather it identifies itself with an existing religious force. Whatever, it’s all just so much jockeying for power. So adhering to the view that F and C are malignancies of S, and that all of these are leftist problems (“National Socialist,” after all), I think I may have struck upon the difference between Commie Socialists and Fascist Socialists — sharpness.
Communism is a bulldozer, whereas Fascism is a jackhammer. Communism attempts to sweep all into its maw with wrenching philosophic changes — to each according to his need, from each according to his ability, and so forth. Fascism instead co-opts existing structures (built by others) to exert pressure on particular pain points within the body society.
Fascism is acute Communism. Communism is chronic Fascism.
Published in General
You are speaking of abuses of language that result in at best worthless, time-consuming, and frustrating debates.
Our community has little control over how those outside of it who engage in it: who…
But since we only engage in dialog amongst ourselves, that lack of influence doesn’t do us much harm.
We should concentrate our time and efforts on a problem that we do have the power to work, and that does directly affect us.
Specifically, we should direct our work toward continuously improving our own shared political glossary. Without writer and reader sharing a common, non-pejorative definition for each noun used by the writer to refer to a category of political belief system (like “populism”), a complete failure to communicate is the best result we can hope for. A more likely result is reader and writer each believing that he is talking about the same belief system, but each of them actually thinking of a a different one. The result of that kind of misunderstanding is either