“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” – Eric Blair (George Orwell)
I recently listened to a discussion between Nick Gillespie, Jonah Goldberg, and Zach Weissmueller about whether Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s incoming prime minister, was a fascist and whether it really did indicate Italy was returning to fascism. (Be warned if you click, it is 87 minutes long.)
I listened mainly because I wanted to hear what Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, had to say on the issue. The book was groundbreaking, inextricably linking fascism with the left. It remains relevant today.
I was not expecting much, and I pretty much got what I expected. The three concluded that Meloni was not a traditional fascist in the sense that she opposed the formula “Everything Within the State, Nothing Against the State, Nothing Outside the State” espoused by Mussolini (and today’s Progressives in the United States and the Davos crowd). However, she was a nationalist, and opposed globalism, and we don’t like her, so yeah, maybe she has fascist tendencies.
Also she opposed big bankers, which means she is anti-Semitic. (Which is true only if you believe Jews run the world economy. What serious person believes that? Even back in the day, most big moneymen, the Rockefellers, Mellons, and Morgans, weren’t Jewish.) The Nazis were anti-Semitic, the Nazis were fascists, and therefore all fascists are anti-Semitic. (Except, of course, the Italian fascists were not. The two safest countries to be a Jew in mainland Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s were fascist Italy and fascist Spain.)
So, yeah, they are using fascism to label something they do not like. Almost 80 years of proving Orwell right.
Kim du Toit points out in his blog (if you are not following it, you are missing something) that fascism wants the state controlling everything. We can argue what fascism is, but that is the defining credo of fascism. Any movement to shrink the size, power, and intrusiveness of the government, whether Meloni’s party or small-government conservatives in the US, is antithetical to government control. No matter how much you dislike it, it is not fascist. Except if you use Orwell’s definition of “something not desirable.”
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