History, not Corporate Media, defines Fascism

What is Fascism? Who are today's modern Fascists?

I asked Grok to draw a modern Fascist, and this is the image it created….

Fascism became a swear word in the US and UK during the Second World War. So it has been ever since, to the point that the term's original meaning has been completely lost. It is no longer used as a term defining a system of political economy but rather is routinely deployed as a weaponized insult drained of meaning and context.

Modern corporate media repeatedly labels center-right populist movements and their leaders as “Far-Right,” “Neo-Nazi,” “Neo-Fascist” or just plain Fascist. Frequently trotted out in the run-up to elections, this trope has been deployed by left-wing governments, corporate media, and their allies so often that it is losing its potency to polarize electorates and dissuade voters.

For example, this corporate media trope involving accusations of “NAZI,” “Far-Right” or “Fascist” continues to be deployed against Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, and her “Brothers of Italy” party, despite her explicit rejection of fascist political philosophy.

Similarly, the self-described anarchocapitalist Austrian School economist President of Argentina, Javier Milei, who appears to be saving the economy of that nation by applying anarchocapitalistic solutions, has been repeatedly labeled a NAZI by Western corporate media, particularly before his election as President.

In today’s Germany, the center-right populist political party known by the acronym AFD (Alliance for Germany or Deutschland) is frequently accused of being far-right NAZIs. Flying a German flag, expressing national pride, or celebrating nationalism is also considered “far right”. Meanwhile, the Eurosocialist left swears forever support and virtual fealty to the current government of Ukraine, which incorporates a significant contingent of true, self-professed neo-Nazis.

And then there is France’s Marie Le Pen and the “National Rally” party, Dutch politician Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom, Nigel Farage and the British Reform UK party, and of course, US President Donald Trump and MAGA. All these and more are repeatedly and routinely labeled as Fascists or “Far Right” by worldwide Western corporate media and Wikipedia.

From the standpoint of objective analysis of logical fallacies, at best, this is an Ad Hominem. At worst, it is yet another example of actively and repeatedly deployed Psychological Warfare- PsyWar- and propaganda. Socialist-leaning left-wing politicians and reporters who routinely deploy accusations of Fascism against their opponents reveal the weakness and failure of their political philosophy and ideas. Borrowing from the jargon of US Football, this is akin to a desperate ‘Hail Mary” pass. This is really just bullying, and it is also projection.

In psychology, projection is a defense mechanism where an individual unconsciously attributes their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to someone else. This process helps the individual cope with internal stress and avoid confronting their own traits or emotions that are difficult to acknowledge. For example, if someone feels jealous but accuses their partner of being envious, they are projecting their own feelings. Another example is when someone is a fan of socialist-corporatism (“democratic socialism”) but accuses others of being Fascist (the definition of “Fascism” being socialistic corporatism).

We must stop permitting corporate media and the far left to demonize the center-right with these terms as a way to keep our voices, thoughts, and ideas from being heard and considered by others. These are the tactics of bullies, specifically those losing a political battle in the marketplace of ideas and political philosophies.

If we go back a decade before the Second World War, we find a completely different situation. Read any writings from polite society from 1932 to 1940 or so, and you are likely to find a consensus that freedom and democracy, along with Enlightenment-style liberalism of the 18th century, were completely doomed. Leading scholars of that period proposed that these systems should be replaced by some version of what was called the planned society, of which fascism was one example.

From a political science standpoint, “Fascism” is a political system representing the integration of socialism with corporatism and the administrative state. In his 1923 pamphlet “The Doctrine of Fascism,” Benito Mussolini wrote “If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.” In a 1937 academic publication titled “Economic policy, Industrial policy, Economics”, Mussolini offered this concise statement: “Fascism is more appropriately called corporatism, for it is the perfect merger of State and corporate power.”

Mussolini’s Fascism was not about individual freedom or laissez-faire economics but rather about the state’s control over the economy and society, with corporations playing a key role. Precisely the political structure being so actively endorsed, promoted, and defended by today’s European Parliament “mainstream” members, the European Council and its leadership, the socialist leadership of the United Nations, and the UN partner organization - the World Economic Forum and its leadership. Those without sin should cast the first stone, and those who live in glass houses should avoid stoning altogether.

The term NAZI is an abbreviated acronym for the German term “Nationalsozialismus.” A case can be made that German “Democratic Socialism” of the present is, to a significant extent, a softer and more palatable version of “Nationalsozialismus” shorn of the anti-semitic component. Likewise, the WEF/Klaus Schwab logic of “stakeholder capitalism” originates in aspects of the political thought underpinning historic German National Socialism.

Winston Churchill, in composing a 1937 essay titled “The Infernal Twins,” addressed the relationship between Nazism and Communism:

“Nazism and Communism imagine themselves as exact opposites. They are at each other’s throats wherever they exist all over the world. They actually breed each other; for the reaction against Communism is Nazism, and beneath Nazism or Fascism Communism stirs convulsively. Yet they are similar in all essentials. First of all, their simplicity is remarkable. You leave out God and put in the Devil; you leave out love and put in hate; and everything thereafter works quite straightforwardly and logically. They are, in fact, as alike as two peas. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are two quite distinctive personalities compared to these two rival religions.”

In other words, if we objectively apply political science definitions and historical precedents, the current modern left-wing socialist politics prevalent in the European Union, European Council, and the majority of European NATO-allied nations are closer to the European Fascist and Communist parties of the 1920s and 1930s than are the center-right populist movements currently sweeping across Europe, North America, Australia, and Argentina. Furthermore, to a significant extent, the political and economic logic underpinning this modern left-wing Euro-logic is also grounded in the “Communist” theories of Karl Marx and his disciples.

In 1937, the compendium titled “Economic policy, Industrial policy, Economics” was published by the prestigious Prentice-Hall, and included contributions by top academics and high-profile influencers. It was highly praised by all respectable outlets at the time.

Book chapter authors explained how the future would be constructed by the finest minds, who would manage whole economies and societies, the best and the brightest with full power. All housing should be provided by the government, for example, and food too, but with the cooperation of private corporations. That seems to be the consensus in the book. Fascism was treated as a legitimate path. Even the word totalitarianism was invoked without opprobrium but rather with respect. Of course, the book has since been memory-holed. The section on economics included contributions by Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin. Their ideas and political rule were treated as a key element of the prevailing conversation of that era.

All of this became a source of embarrassment after the war, so it was largely forgotten. However, the affection on the part of many sectors of the US ruling class for fascism was still in place. It merely took on new names.

As a result, the lesson of the war, that the US should stand for freedom above all else while wholly rejecting fascism as a system, was essentially buried. Generations have been taught to regard fascism as nothing but a quirky and failed system of the past, leaving the word to persist as an insult to fling at any persons deemed reactionary or old-fashioned.

---

There remains valuable literature on the topic from that time when fascism rose to political prominence. One particularly insightful book is “The Vampire Economy” by Günter Reimann, a financier in Germany who chronicled the dramatic changes to industrial structures under the Nazis. In a few short years, from 1933 to 1939, a nation of enterprise and small shopkeepers was converted to a corporate-dominated machine that gutted the middle class and cartelized industry in preparation for war.

The book was published in 1939 before the invasion of Poland and the onset of Europe-wide war and accurately chronicles the grim reality just before hell broke loose. “The corruption in fascist countries arises inevitably from the reversal of the roles of the capitalist and the State as wielders of economic power,” wrote Reimann.

The Nazis were not hostile to business as a whole but only opposed traditional, independent, family-owned, small businesses that offered nothing for purposes of nation-building and war planning. The crucial tool to make this happen was establishing the Nazi Party as the central regulator of all enterprises. The large businesses had the resources to comply and the wherewithal to develop good relations with political masters, whereas the undercapitalized small businesses were squeezed to the point of extinction. You could make bank under Nazi rules provided you put first things first: regime before customers.

“Most businessmen in a totalitarian economy feel safer if they have a protector in the State or Party bureaucracy,” Reimann wrote. “They pay for their protection, as did the helpless peasants of feudal days. However, it is inherent in the present lineup of forces that the official is often sufficiently independent to take the money but fails to provide the protection.”

Reimann went on to conclude that:

“the decline and ruin of the genuinely independent businessman, who was the master of his enterprise and exercised his property rights. This type of capitalist is disappearing, but another type is prospering. He enriches himself through Party ties; he is a Party member devoted to the Fuehrer, favored by the bureaucracy, entrenched because of family connections and political affiliations. In a number of cases, the wealth of these Party capitalists has been created through the Party’s exercise of naked power. It is to the advantage of these capitalists to strengthen the Party, which has strengthened them. Incidentally, it sometimes happens that they become so strong that they constitute a danger to the system, upon which they are liquidated or purged.”

This was particularly true for independent publishers and distributors. Their gradual bankruptcy served to effectively nationalize all surviving media outlets who knew that it was in their interests to echo Nazi Party priorities.

Returning again to Reimann’s analysis:

“The logical outcome of a fascist system is that all newspapers, news services, and magazines become more or less direct organs of the fascist party and State. They are governmental institutions over which individual capitalists have no control and very little influence except as they are loyal supporters or members of the all-powerful party.” “Under fascism or any totalitarian regime, an editor no longer can act independently,” “Opinions are dangerous. He must be willing to print any ‘news’ issued by State propaganda agencies, even when he knows it to be completely at variance with the facts, and he must suppress real news that reflects upon the wisdom of the leader. His editorials can differ from another newspaper’s only in so far as he expresses the same idea in a different language. He has no choice between truth and falsehood, for he is merely a State official for whom ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ do not exist as a moral problem but are identical with the interests of the Party.”

One key feature of Fascist policy involved aggressive price controls. They did not work to suppress inflation but these controls were politically useful in other ways. “Under such circumstances, nearly every businessman necessarily becomes a potential criminal in the eyes of the Government,” wrote Reimann. “There is scarcely a manufacturer or shopkeeper who, intentionally or unintentionally, has not violated one of the price decrees. This has the effect of lowering the authority of the State; on the other hand, it also makes the State authorities more feared, for no businessman knows when he may be severely penalized.”

From there, Reimann tells many chilling stories about, for example, the pig farmer who faced price ceilings on his product and got around them by selling a high-priced dog alongside a low-priced pig, after which the dog was returned. This kind of maneuvering became common.

This book provides a brilliant inside look at how enterprise functions under a fascist-style regime, and the accounts provided clearly document both the reality of fascism while also foreshadowing current developments in some modern western “democracies”. Of course, a key difference is that the historic German case was fascism with a racialist and anti-Jewish twist for purposes of political purges. In 1939, it was not entirely obvious at the time how this would end in mass and targeted extermination on a gargantuan scale. The German system in those days bore much resemblance to the Italian case, which was fascism without the ambition of full ethnic cleansing (genocide). In that case, it bears examination as a model for how fascism can reveal itself in other contexts.

---

Italian-style fascism is well described in John T. Flynn’s 1944 classic “As We Go Marching.” Flynn was a widely respected journalist, historian, and scholar in the 1930s who was largely forgotten after the war due to his political activities. But his outstanding scholarship stands the test of time. His book deconstructs the history of fascist ideology in Italy from a half-century prior and explains the centralizing ethos of the system, both in politics and economics.

Following an erudite examination of the main theorists, Flynn provided a beautiful summary.

Fascism, he wrote, is a form of social organization with the following characteristics:

1. In which the government acknowledges no restraint upon its powers—totalitarianism.

2. In which this unrestrained government is managed by a dictator—the leadership principle.

3. In which the government is organized to operate the capitalist system and enable it to function under an immense bureaucracy.

4. In which the economic society is organized on the syndicalist model; that is, by producing groups formed into craft and professional categories under supervision of the state.

5. In which the government and the syndicalist organizations operate the capitalist society on the planned, autarkical principle.

6. In which the government holds itself responsible for providing the nation with adequate purchasing power by public spending and borrowing.

7. In which militarism is used as a conscious mechanism of government spending.

8. In which imperialism is included as a policy inevitably flowing from militarism as well as other elements of fascism.

In particular, point number 5 merits closer examination, with its focus on syndicalist organizations. In those days, “syndicalist organizations” consisted of large corporations that were run with an emphasis on union organization of the workforce. In our own times, this model has been replaced by a managerial overclass in tech and pharma that have the ear of government and have developed close ties with the public sector, each depending on the other. This is why this system is called corporatist.

In today’s polarized political environment, the left continues to worry about unbridled capitalism, while the right is forever on the lookout as the enemy of full-blown socialism. Each side has reduced fascistic corporatism to a historical problem on the level of witch burning, fully conquered but useful as a historical reference to form a contemporary insult against the other side.

As a result, and armed with partisan causes that bear no resemblance to any existing threat, hardly anyone who is politically engaged and active is fully aware that there is nothing particularly new about what WEF leader Klaus Schwab called “The Great Reset”. It is a corporatist model – a combination of the worst of capitalism and socialism without limits – of privileging the elite at the expense of the many, which is why these historical works by Reimann and Flynn seem so familiar to us today.

And yet, for some strange reason, the tactile reality of fascism in practice – not the insult but the historical system – is hardly known either in popular or academic culture. That makes it all the easier to reimplement such a system in our time, and to weaponize the term as an insult designed to delegitimize both center-right populist political parties as well as individuals who do not accept narratives being promoted by the left.

---