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Entry: Springtime for Fascism Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/springtime_for_fascism#18723 Post contents: Much correct, a little incorrect. 1. Mr. P. is correct that Mussolini’s movement was unique, and Boyd Cathey is correct to demand exactness in definition. So to define: Lower case <b>f</b>ascism is Ultranationalism, be it ethnic/tribalist or racialist. Roger Griffin then gives fascism an even more precise definition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Griffin Upper case <b>F</b>ascism, Benito’s movement, wasn’t racialist at all until 1938, and was only <i>secondarily</i> nationalist. For <b>f</b>ascism, Leviathan is the servant of the Volk; for Fascism, Leviathan will make with fist and jackboot the various Italian Völker into one Volk. Instead of being primarily nationalist, <b>F</b>ascism <i>primarily</i> is the political expression of a military movement, the Arditi morphing into the Squadristi, and even more the political expression of an aesthetic movement, Futurism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism It would not be incorrect to all most modern architecture "quasi-Fascist". 2. Mr. P. is correct that Commies get a free ride, however close this might skirt to the Tu Quoque fallacy. 3. Mr. P. is correct that Osama is pursuing a religious war, not a Ultranationalist one, and thus to call him an “Islamofascist” is just buncombe. We haven’t had a religious war in the West since the battle of the Boyne, and we’ve forgotten that such wars work on different dynamics than Nationalist ones. By the way, the conflict in Palestine and Balkans, from what I can tell, is most likely nationalist, not religious. 4. Mr. P. is correct also that libertarians are wrong to call FDR, a social democrat, a “fascist”. That both Social Democracy, Fascism, fascism, Communism, Cultural Marxism, and the Whigs are statist is true enough. “Hobbes is the father of us all” (almost). Still these movements differ considerably. It could be argued that Corporatism and Syndicalism can be, at least theoretically, more non-statist than statist. 5. Partly incorrect: <i>what so thoroughly discredited fascism was not the domestic policies of Mussolini’s Italy, but the aggressive wars waged by the Fascist dictators, culminating in the horrific Nazi crimes of World War II.</i> True only in part: The crimes in addition to wars of aggression were racialism and Judeophobia. And Benito’s domestic policies were hardly anything to boast about. 6. Paul Gottfried is correct to mention in passing Clerical Fascism and clerical fascism, an omission in Mr. P’s article. To be fair, Mr. P didn’t have space to mention everything on the topic. 7. It must be said emphatically that fascism and Fascism are real threats, as anyone who reads writebacks on this site knows. And fascism and Fascism and their clerical forms are not Burkean/Tory/Blanc conservatism, however much such conservatives may have been and may be fascists’ and Fascists “useful idiots”. Sent at: 2008 11 22