You also hear the same rhetoric coming from some on the Right. I have been hearing this stuff since the days of Richard Nixon. I suppose if we elect Ron Paul some will find that he is is really a plant of the Moose Lodge or the Alien Reptilians. Frankly there are a lot of people out there who are on drugs or else need to be on drugs or an increased dose.
Fascism might come one day but it will only come when the American people want it to come. When Americans are willing to give up all their freedoms for security it will evolve into fascism.
For that to happen there will first have to a major threat to America’s security. That probably can only happen if we let terrorists invade our country and let criminal gangsters take over our cities and let perverts set our moral standards.
Yeah, I know we have already let that happen. So come to think of it, maybe fascism is right around the corner. But don’t blame George Bush, blame yourself for electing the people you do to office who do not enforce our laws. When fascism really comes it most likely will not come by George Bush’s secret Skull and Cross Bones Society it more likely will come in under the Far Left side of Hillary’s skirt.
The Horror! The Horror! The fascists are coming! Or rather, they’re already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America’s increasingly unhinged left. If only, sigh many Bush partisans, wondering when this administration will get out of the fetal position and show some fighting spirit. To them, as to most reasonable observers, the White House shows the chronic fatigue of a two-term presidency reaching its final year. Nonetheless, paranoia about what Bush and Co. are up to preys on the minds of many progressives, who have progressed, in this case at least, beyond reason.
Hi Don,
I guess you could say this is one of my peet peeves. ‘Fascism’ really is one of the most widely misused terms ever. I wonder how many people really know what it means.
Fascism is an openly totalitarian ideology, said Mussolini – the spiritual father of Fascism, that rejects the individualism of Classical Liberalism as well as laissez-faire Capitalism.
Fascism also rejects the Internationalism and class struggle found in Marxism. Fascism, Mussolini argued, seeks class collaboration rather than class struggle. Still, Mussolini, a former Socialist, continued to consider Marx as his spiritual father. He said that his movement was both reactionary and revolutionary at the same time.
Musolini was not a religious man but unlike his Communist counterparts, he did not seek to get rid of the Catholic Church because he’d not win the common man in strongly Catholic Italy this way. It was also in keeping with the idea of ‘class collaboration’ that he cooperated with the (Catholic) Church. Protestants, however, and Jehovah Witnesses were persecuted.
As said, Fascism was an openly totalitarian system. To Mussolini, ‘totalitarian’ meant that the individual and his will were subject to the State. The State was the ‘people’. As such, there was no such thing as the inalienable rights America’s Founding Fathers believed in and no such thing as the ‘Invisible Hand’ in economics. Mussolini said the 20th century would become known as the age of totalitarianism. And you can’t say he was wrong on this one, unfortunately.
The economic policies of Fascists and Nazis were ‘progressive’ and typically left-wing, based on the ideas of Keynes. They rejected laissez-faire Capitalism, the dominant economic system until the Great Depression which lead to the New Deal in the United States. They were strongly Corporatist which, on an economic level, meant that private property was allowed to some degree, but corporations were State-funded and their profits or the goods produced went to the State. And Socialists admired them for their econmic success even though after the Second World War, Italy faced enormous debts.
What’s the relation between Conservatism and Fascism? Well, it’s something that needs to be seen in proper context. Fascism appealed to many Conservatives and reactionaries because they, like the Fascists, strongly opposed the rise of Communism in Italy at the time. They rejected Communism’s class strugle, the ‘proletarian’ revolution and other radical changes but that’s where it ends really. And tell me, Liberal scaremongers, how do men like Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Disraeli, Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk compare to Fascists and Nazis?
That’s right, I bet you Liberals don’t even know what Conservatism’s core tenets are either. True Conservatism rejects ideology, it rejects the idea that man is by nature fundamentally ‘good’. Conservatism looks back to the past to find truth, wisdom and guidance and seeks to preserve what is good. It does not oppose change but it does reject radical changes based on unattainable idealistic utopias. It is founded on the belief that all men are evil by nature, or at least inclined to do wrong and that everything is fallible. For this reason, Conservatism supports traditional values, limited and decentralized government. It regards the traditional family as the corner stone of civilization because it brings order, morality, justice, freedom and other virtues to society without the need of a social engineering by big governments that enslave the minds of the people to create ‘order’. Murder, rape, thievery and fraud cannot be tolerated in a society that values virtue and it is one of the core tasks of goverment to punish those who commit such crimes. Children are to be raised and educated by their parents, not by the State. Conservatism supports private property because it enables man to be self-reliant, free and independent, and to provide for himself and his family. Conservatism opposes governments that take from man what he’s worked for and earned in an honest way.
The problem is they’re all caught up in the belief that Fascism and Nazism are ‘extreme right-wing’. Just take a look at this page and you’ll soon find out where that the ‘extreme right’ is not so ‘right-wing’ in reality. Fascism is in many ways a collectivist ideology, much like Marxism.
Some criticism on Neo-Conservatism from other Conservatives is undoubtedly deserved. However, Liberals who don’t know what Conservatism is all about anyway go way too far when they say all Republicans are nothing but militarists and racists because the Republican Party today is by far the most popular party in the U.S. South. Tell me, what’s the name of the party that was founded by Northern anti-slavery activists again? And tell me, aren’t Rice and Powell – Blacks, and Alberto Gonzalez – a Hispanic? And doesn’t the large majority of Conservatives oppose discrimination on the basis of one’s color of skin?
Tell me, do you live by the U.S. Constitution and the principles of your nation’s Founding Fathers more than the Republicans do? Do none of you ever lie and use fear to misguide the public for political and electoral gain? Are none of you hidden racists? Do any of you believe in limited government or do you all believe that the State should act for what it believes to be the ‘common good’? Do any of you believe in isolationism and reject excessive interventionism? Can any of you explain to me how ‘civil rights’ are more important than virtues and why you would even defend thugs, terrorists and perverts in name of these cil rights while they infringe on the freedom and dignity of law-abiding citizens? Do any of you support the fact that private enterprise is more efficient than the State? If so, do let me know about it. In the meantime, go take a Fascism 101 and a Conservatism 101, please!
Later,
Ruben
Hi Ruben,
Well said, you know quite a bit for a young man. They must still still have some fragments of an education system in Belgium.
A good percentage of young people in America cannot even find the US on the globe.
The Nazis are not called the National Socialist party because they believe in Conservative Right wing principles.
The Leftist perverts in the US believes the Far Right is some national government with a national strong man figure like Bush that opposes their perverted agendas with a police state. That is way they are always calling Bush a Fascist.
If we actually had a strong Far Right movement it would stop the perverts at the grass roots level in each individual community. Somewhat like what real Christians have been attempting to do in their local communities until they are stopped by the Left who occupy positions of national power and influence.
In reality the Far Right wants as little Federal government as possible.
The perverted Left cannot see that all the dictator figures like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao etc were perverted socialists like themselves.
We can thank our educational system for that. It has have made: Left, Right; Good, Evil; Light, Darkness; Truth, lies; and God, Chance.