woody.typepad via Steven Crowder/Twitter
If
you managed to wade through Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, you already know that the term “fascism” has been
misappropriated by Communists, Progressives, and other left-of-center isms to mean the opposite of its original far
left definition. Several online dictionaries today reflect the switch in meaning, and
even the Wikipedia entry shows the difficulty of navigating the origins of the
term and its current usage by the political Left as a pejorative.
Today
Bookworm (of the Bookworm Room blog) has a piece at American Thinker that
summarizes the origin of the left/right nomenclature and the sleight-of-hand in
redefining “fascism” – all in the context of a short history lesson. The entire article is here. Below are a couple of extracts:
For months now, the
Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in
connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael
Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington
Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.
. . .
Given that conservatives
Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty
side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise
to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and
Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”?
You can
blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American
communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political
“right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives,
being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.
. . .
“Fascism,” another historic
term, is one that American statists embraced until Hitler tainted it. It
first gained political traction in Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini defined it to
mean “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the
state.” In other words, fascism is purely on the statist side of the continuum.
Savvy readers will have noticed
that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all
power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state.
The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the
government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government
does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case,
for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for
the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.
. . .
One more thing: Obama said that
the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure
to grab more guns from American hands. Statists always grab guns
because their regimes are
fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it
impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical
government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis
of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.
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