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To: Berlin_Freeper

Meaningless drivel.

I went to look at Wikipedia’s article on Fascism this weekend and while different writers’ and politicians claims about Fascism are listed, there is scant agreement about just what it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

George Orwell was quoted with some descriptions but in the closing of the article is this very particular description of how the word lost all meaning as it was turned into a shapeless insult:

George Orwell wrote in 1944:

...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 ... Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathisers, 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.[54]


15 posted on 07/15/2019 6:06:18 PM PDT by a fool in paradise (Denounce DUAC - The Democrats Un-American Activists Committee)
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To: a fool in paradise

I very much like this quote from Hayek comparing Fascism to Communism:

Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”

No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Lives on my profile page.


24 posted on 07/15/2019 6:14:43 PM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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