One of my pet peeves is the near constant misuse of the term Fascism by people, mostly on the left but also a large number of supposed “libertarians”, who need a loaded term to hurl at political opponents when someone, usually a Republican or conservative, questions the validity of their Stalinist or Anarchist world view.

If you’re a Republican, I mean a literal Republican who believes in a society which safe guards individual peoples right to go about their business without being forced into compliance of whatever trendy group think is being vomited out of our broken higher education system the entire left, from “Blue Dog” Democrats to the Communists infested “radical” movement quickly label you a Fascist.

Likewise, when that same Republican says that the tax protest movement is largely a sham and that Ed Brown’s an anti American kook or that Aaron Russo is a crackpot (all things which are easily verifiable) then the charge of Fascism comes flying at us from our far right, from “libertarians” who are really Anarcho-Capitalists since most decent Libertarians eventually leave the party for saner pastures. Once we voice support for an aggressive fight against Islamic Imperialism, the true Fascists in modern times, we Republicans have morphed from Fascist dogs to full fledged National Socialists in the “libertarian” mind.

I’d be more offended if any of these people seemed to know what Fascism was.

And what’s galling is that it isn’t hard to learn. Benito Mussolini, the man who created Fascism, wrote extensively about in detail. Fascism is, and pay attention to this part my left leaning friends, a form of Socialism where the State is considered more important than the individual as it is the repository of the “common good.” Or as Mussolini himself put it in his essay The Doctrine of Fascism:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity (11). It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts

The rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual (12). And if liberty is to he the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State (13). The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State – a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values – interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people (14).

No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State (15). Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State (16).

The above sounds as if it could have been penned as a description of the modern left frankly. The capital “s” State bringing unions and other social and political groups into it’s “orbit” (control) and being the moral and spiritual authority of a nation sounds like the Clinton or Edwards platform. It reminds me of an interview with Tammy Bruce I read at Right Wing News where she described the dynamics of the American left as a victim hood based identity collective that acts to suppress individuality. The modern left has a concept of the “common good” that is essentially a reworking of Mussolini’s State.

Yet it is Republicans who are Fascists.

Like the Fascists of Italy the modern left’s ideology is grounded in Socialism. Mussolini himself makes no bones about the fact that Fascism is a reworking of Socialism:

When in the now distant March of 1919, speaking through the columns of the Popolo d’Italia I summoned to Milan the surviving interventionists who had intervened, and who had followed me ever since the foundation of the Fascist of revolutionary action in January 1915, I had in mind no specific doctrinal program. The only doctrine of which I had practical experience was that of socialism, from until the winter of 1914 – nearly a decade. My experience was that both of a follower and a leader but it was not doctrinal experience. My doctrine during that period had been the doctrine of action. A uniform, universally accepted doctrine of Socialism had not existed since 1905, when the revisionist movement, headed by Bernstein, arose in Germany, countered by the formation, in the see-saw of tendencies, of a left revolutionary movement which in Italy never quitted the field of phrases, whereas, in the case of Russian socialism, it became the prelude to Bolshevism.

Reformism, revolutionism, centrism, the very echo of that terminology is dead, while in the great river of Fascism one can trace currents which had their source in Sorel, Peguy, Lagardelle of the Movement Socialists, and in the cohort of Italian syndicalist who from 1904 to 1914 brought a new note into the Italian socialist environment – previously emasculated and chloroformed by fornicating with Giolitti’s party – a note sounded in Olivetti’s Pagine Libere, Orano’s Lupa, Enrico Leone’s Divenirs Socials.

When the war ended in 1919 Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge, especially in Italy where its only chance lay in inciting to reprisals against the men who had willed the war and who were to be made to pay for it.

In other words, when socialism failed, as it inevitably does, it’s totalitarian minded adherents found another name for their ideology, made it more anti-human and made another go of it. Just like the Communists in America I suppose, who are now part of the anti-war, environmental justice and “immigrant rights” movements.

They are the real Fascists, but that doesn’t stop “libertarians” from quoting them to attack Republicans. Aside from paying our taxes and not believing in a vast N.W.O. conspiracy, the main reason these theoretically freedom minded individuals usually start crying fascists is because President Bush is supposedly taking away their constitutionally guaranteed (The Roe vs Wade amendment I assume) right to privacy by tapping the phones and E-mails of suspected terrorists communicating with known terrorists in terrorist harboring countries.

Of course, they quote the A.C.L.U. and other “far left” (an unfortunate euphemism for Marxists as it helps mask these groups true goals) organizations who put forward the canard that no one has the right to know what you’re doing. The “libertarians” who side with the left on this issue are seemingly blissfully unaware of the Marxist bait and switch on this issue.

These groups don’t believe in your other rights, for example your right to own a gun or chose your own religion. They offer the privacy argument as a smoke screen. They keep the option of the government making what you do in the privacy of your home, like owning a gun, looking at porn, praying to the god of your choice and reading anything you want, illegal while offering you the “protection” of privacy rights.

I don’t know about you, but as long as I can still buy a gun, a copy of Swank, a Bastet statue and a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, I don’t care who knows it. The A.C.L.U. and like minded groups want things the other way around: As long as no one knows what you’re doing, which their communist government made illegal, you’re safe. That’s not American, or even Libertarian.

But supposed libertarians think this way, and will no doubt call me a Fascist for disagreeing. Case in point, Knight of Pan (a blog I enjoy immensely) had posted the above pic along with a dreadfully tedious attack on television and the Patriot Act:

How many T.V. programs program Americans into submission? Is it any wonder that so many Americans were willing to give up their rights when the Patriot Act was passed? The search and surveillance parts of which now have been deemed illegal!

I’d recommend turning off the T.V. for a few moments and reading some of our founding documents. There’s good reasons our founding fathers had laws against unreasonable search and seizure, freedom of speech and separation of Church and State. There’s also a big reason that they wrote the 2nd Amendment. America is asleep at the wheel staring blindly at a T.V., wake up!

It’s odd that he inserts his pro Second Amendment statement in the very same post that he links to the A.C.L.U. who’s statement on Gun rights is defiantly not libertarian:

We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government. In today’s world, that idea is somewhat anachronistic and in any case would require weapons much more powerful than handguns or hunting rifles. The ACLU therefore believes that the Second Amendment does not confer an unlimited right upon individuals to own guns or other weapons nor does it prohibit reasonable regulation of gun ownership, such as licensing and registration.

I guess arguing for an interpretation of the constitution as granting collective rights and not rights to individuals is more libertarian than believing that every American, and really every person in the world, has a right to defend themselves from tyranny.

But what do I know, I’m apparently a Fascist.