Last week, President Brandon accused Republicans of being “Semi-Fascists”.
To be fair, it sort of sounded like one of his “is he senile, or just not very bright” moments:
I could go either way, to be honest.
But it got me thinking about a couple of things.
What’s In A Word
The left has been devaluing the term “fascist” since I was in high school, and long before, if I recall.
If you want to be pedantic about it, in the 1910s Benito Mussolini – at the time a prominent Italian socialist – figured that while a command economy, a welfare state and state ownership of the mean of production might go over just fine, Internationalism – the concept near and dear to socialism that eventually all borders will be rendered moot by the unification of workers around the world – was not going to fly with Italy, which was had been a nation for about fifty years, and had a lot of nationalist energy about it.
And, presto change-o, Mussolini did some tinkering; in founding the Italian “Fascist” Party, he chucked the “internationalism”, and replaced it with a heaping helping of nationalism. The command economy, nationalization of assets and welfare state, of course, he kept – to Italy’s chagrin in World War 2, as the command economy lagged the rest of Europe so badly that the Italian war machine was positively handicapped.
Most “Fascist” movements – the Nazis, Franco’s Falange and so on – repeat that pattern, keeping the small-l socialism, substituting nationalist dogma for internationalist chanting.
Of course, the left’s version of “fascism” is more nearly described as “saying or doing anything I don’t agree with”.
These days, references to “fascism” almost invariably seek to “other” those your crowd wants to erase from the public square;
And we’ve been seeing an awful lot of that, lately.
How much?
More tomorrow.
Drop The F
So as we close in on President Brandon’s “speech about America’s Soul” on Friday near the Liberty Bell, let’s talk about some of the attributes of…
…well, not ‘fascism’, per se. Or at least not only fascism.
Let’s talk, instead, about authoritarianism, by whatever name you want to call it.
About government that:
- Ignores, subverts and/or perverts the rule of law in favor of the rule of men
- legitimizes itself in comparison to some boogeyman, without or within – a boogieman that personifies all evil in the eyes of the state, and who must be subjugated for “good” to prevail.
- Sublimates everything to a more or less utopian vision of what the world could be, if they had the means
More tomorrow.
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