“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… almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.” – George Orwell, What is Fascism?. 1944.

That is just as true today as it was in 1944. I see the cynic attempting to draw a parallel of America to Nazi Germany by pointing to our economic policies, and completely ignoring the core of Nazism, which was the superiority of race, with the state and individual beneath it.

I think it’s a reach much too far to call America fascist on the basis of economic policy alone considering the tenets of protection built-in to our Constitution and upheld by our Supreme Court. While some of our economic policies in regards to finance may have parallels with fascism, to call our entire country, or even our entire economic policy fascist

My main point was the difference between the classical definition of fascism and the modern American common usage definition of fascism. The existence of competing definitions of fascism serves a very useful Orwellian purpose for the the ruling class in its quest to impose doublethink on the masses.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” J.W. Von Goethe

I cannot help the irony that corporate socialism IS fascism, as is national socialism. Arguing semantics is a waste, besides does anyone think that Radley could get the term fascism past FOX News censors when applied to the good old USA.

We are witnessing the largest bank robbery in the world, and your stocks and pensions are already in someone’s pockets. You just haven’t received the notice.

See ya at the reunion,

Formerly Fascist Fuckhole

Actually, fascism is misunderstood by many, largely owing to ignorant mass-media mouthpieces conflating the term with totalitarianism or dictatorship. Fascism is a government/business partnership, also known as corporatism. Instead of the government directly employing the mechanisms of state, it outsources traditional public government functions to (ostensibly) private business. Thus, the high priests of government ensure that the infinite stream of money stolen from the productive classes funnels directly into the bank accounts of their industrial partners in crime, wherein the elite get their enormous cut and the crumbs fall down to the masses.

Actually, Fascist economics is based on the idea of collectivizing the economy by heavily regulating established businesses. You can think of it as “decoupled Socialism” wherein the state merely bosses businesses into following state policies, rather than taking over full, daily control and controlling them as a government ministry.

Both Fascism and Socialism seek similar outcomes. Most people just get stuck on stupid with their methods, as though the methodological differences are so extreme that the shared goal is rendered irrelevant.

It’s also ironic that people call Fascism a distinctly right-wing phenomenon when the originators of Italian Fascism were devoted Marxists who had the intellectual honesty to admit that Capitalism was actually thriving, not dying. The reason that Fascism actually somewhat works, where Communism doesn’t, is that the Fascists went back to the drawing board and revised their theories to mesh Marxism with the reality that they were actually seeing. Marxists are like scientists who are so passionately devoted to their theoretical models that no amount of data to the contrary will convince them to revisit them.

What? Too obvious?

(*I apologize non-Simpsons fans, for whom this comment is even less funny than it is otherwise.)