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Entry: Islamo-Foosball Awareness Week Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/islamo_foosball_awareness_week#10411 Post contents: "Fascist" is for the most part a meaningless epithet, usually applied by someone on the left, or someone wishing to attract the sympathy of the left, to someone whose politics he doesn't like (usually, but not always, someone on the right). This is the consequence of the well known phenomenon whereby the history of the vanquished is written by the victor. The real victor of the Second World War was Stalin. His followers, who were and are legion amongst the chattering class, were eager to portray that war as the "Great Patriotic War" in which heroic socialists defeated the forces of reaction. The conflation of Nazism with Fascism is a characteristic peculiarity of Soviet rhetoric and one readily taken up by the American left. Of course anyone acquainted with history knows that Hitler was allied with Stalin for almost two years at the beginning of WWII, and that long before that - dating back to Locarno - the Bolsheviks, who were not signatory to the Treaty of Versailles, had helped Germany to re-arm itself in violation of that treaty. After Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, these facts became inconvenient. Within the Soviet Union, where history was easily re-written, it disappeared down the memory hole, In the West, communist fellow-travellers in academia and journalism did their best to sweep it under the carpet. In examining what Nazism and Fascism really were, we of course discover that they were movements of the left. Nazi, after all, is a colloquialism for National Socialist - what could be a more clear indication that Nazism is a branch of the collectivist family tree? As for Mussolini's fascism, it developed out of his early experience as a socialist rabble-rouser, born to a family of socialist and anti-clerical convictions. Mussolini was a scoffer at religion, once defying God, if he existed, to strike him dead. As Umberto Eco observed, God had other fish to fry at the time. The Lateran treaty of 1929 was a coldblooded act of realpolitik on Mussolini's part, rather than indicating any reconciliation with the Church. It laid to rest an issue that had been festering since the Risorgimento and made Italy easier for him to govern. In trying to understand fascism we would do well to consider the career of the British fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley was a member of the Labour party and quit it when he was disappointed in not being advanced to a cabinet-level ministry. He first formed the New Party in 1931 and then the British Union of Fascists in 1932. British fascism was largely devoid of the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, and did not need the belligerent nationalism of Mussolini's Italy, with its fledgling steps towards imperialism in Libya and Ethiopia - Britain already was a powerful nation with an extensive empire. What we find in Mosley's fascism is the essence of the idea, stripped of these purely local German and Italian features. It is, simply, state control of everything without state ownership. In classical socialism, the state owns the means of production. In fascism, the state takes the lion's share of business profits through taxation and exerts control over most of business policy through regulation - leaving nominal ownership to the private sector, and 100% of the liability should an enterprise fail. There is a welfare state, mucxh social control through bureaucracy, and a single government covering the European continent. I suspect that Mosley would snort in disgust at the mush-drip of political correctness in which the modern European Union abounds, and would be alarmed at the large percentage of its population made up by non-European immigrants, but would broadly approve of the structure of the EU and of its economic and social dirigisme. It is in Brussels, and not amongst the votaries of al-Qaeda, that the spirit of Fascism lives today. Sent at: 2008 05 16