An excerpt from Brendan O’Neill’s essay, Bolsonaro is not a fascist, on the danger of branding everyone a fascist; something rather than genuinely foreboding, becoming a sign of intellectual laziness.
INTRODUCTION
Mussolini’s made a prediction of the future in the Last Days of his “Italian Social Republic” in 1945, when he gave instructions to Italian Fascists on how exactly to carry forward after his death.
“The present war will produce an alteration in order of rank. Great Britain, for instance, is destined to become a second-class power, in view of disclosure of Russian and American strength (…) In a short time, Fascism will once more shine on the horizon. First of all, because of the persecution to which the Liberals will subject it, showing that liberty is something to reserve to oneself and refuse to others.”
BENITO MUSSOLINI
It was not men like Trump, that Mussolini had in mind when he spoke to his fellow Italian Fascists. Many people become highly emotional when I reject their position, that Trump is a Fascist. I must say at the beginning, that it is not incorrect to compare the Trump administration and the political climate to tendencies and strategies used by the Fascists and National Socialists. It is not difficult to demonstrate the similarities in political machinations from today and that time period. However, then we would also have to acknowledge the fact, that those tendencies have manifested in movements and political leaders throughout history. The point I make, which is a historical fact, is that we do not merely have Hitler or Mussolini as a comparison or tactic; and I repeatedly state, that this tactic has long lost its luster.
It affects my work, the extent to which I can educate, and my research on the actual content and origins of Italian Fascism as a martial philosophical and political system grounded in historical and regional contexts. I would argue against any man, that this Fascism does not exist in politics today, and we may never see it again. The muddied definition of Fascism is part of the degenerating political discourse in the U.S. An example is that arguments about logical consequences in ideology and the origins of surveillance and the police state simply get associated with Fascism, or as having their origin in Fascism. They do not.
So, here we have a problem in the psychology of many people. The term fascism cannot be saved or resuscitated. To suggest otherwise, explained Brendan O’Neill is unwise, as the term is dead, and transformed into a mere insult. It is the attempt of Americans to readily blame an external ideology as the root of their troubles, as if their troubles begin with the existence of the National Socialists, who were in fact inspired by the Americans, e.g., Jim Crow law. Journalists believe they got a great title and article ahead of them by drawing connections of Donald Trump with Hitler or Mussolini.
The tactic and its effect have proven a failure time and time again. At first, the journalists kept comparing Trump and his pseudo-populist movement to past political uprisings and populists in ancient Rome, but this had no psychological pull-on Americans who only see history revolving around themselves. Many journalists have tried and mustered the supporting evidence of comparisons to no end. The seeds of fascism we are told was planted in Italy! A once easy-going, generous people became belligerent and bullying when the airs of fascism fumed a raging perspiration across the nation!
Now, it as if they do not know their enemy, and cannot find better ways to educate Americans about any other history besides World War II and Adolf Hitler. Hitler and Fascism create a myth the American can run to, to escape homegrown problems. This is even creating a mass psychosis, even among the American Right.
R.J.B. Bosworth wrote in his 2005 book “Mussolini’s Italy,” “Border fascism,” an obsession with borders and keeping the population pure, was always a “key strain in the fascist melody,” as was “allowing the nation to stand tall again,” H.D.S. Greenway tells us in Seeds of fascism sprout anew in Trump’s America.
All is needed, Bosworth says is a charismatic leader. Even charisma brings nostalgia of Mussolini. If you are a politician with charisma, vivid images of Hitler come to mind.
What is this obsession with Hitler and Mussolini? We are warned that American Fascism is here, as if these habits of thinking Trump and his movement exhibits did not exist prior to Mussolini or Hitler.
Before that we are told, that in Robert O. Paxton’s 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Fascism did not die with the end of World War II. Its seeds were planted “within all democratic countries, not excluding the United States.”
According to Paxton, fascism was a “form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood.” Fascism he claims, “was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.”
Really?
So, Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism, Gentile’s The Philosophic Basis of Fascism and The General Theory of the Spirit and Palmieri’s The Philosophy of Fascism are just founded on “gut emotion?” We can define and muddy terms as much as we like from this understanding. How does that poor explanation help us understand Fascism? It does not.
What does any of it have to do with Giovanni Gentile, or in the actual History of Italian-American Fascism: of Count Ignazio Thaon di Revel and Dino Bigongiari’s efforts; of Ugo V. D’Annunzio, Joseph Santi, Domenico Trombetta, Salvatore Caridi, William Dudley Pelley and others?
Speaking of gut-emotion, what of democracy then, and the democratic masses — the dangers of the “democratic Will (emotion) of the People,” as irrationally displayed in our country? Devastated masses who want to fight Fascism, turning to crayons and color-books to sooth their political defeat. The standing typical generic view of fascism exacerbates our present conundrum. It is why we cannot seem to understand the spreading critiques of the liberal tradition, in our condescending treatment of the agitation of peoples.
The habit in this time-period of short-coding everything is dumbing-down our political discourse.
Brendan O’Neill on Fascism
“It is probably futile now to argue for the proper use of the word fascism. To rail against the transformation of ‘fascist’ into a casual insult. To insist that fascism doesn’t mean ‘evil’ or ‘illiberal’ or even ‘demagogic’, but rather has a more specific meaning, and a more profound one.
The f-word has been destroyed through overuse, its original sense and power diluted by a million op-eds branding unpleasant politicians ‘fascists’ and by radical marchers hollering ‘fascist scum’ at anyone who irritates them: President Donald Trump, UKIP leader Nigel Farage, the cops. On the right, too, the accusation of fascism has become a Tourette’s-style cry. It’s the left who are the real fascists, they say. Ugly alt-right barbs like ‘feminazi’ and ‘eco-fascist’ confirm that right-wingers are now as likely to scream ‘fascist’ as they are to have it screamed at them.
The wise thing to do would be to accept that the term fascist is beyond repair. It’s a dead word. It now means bastard. It’s an emotional insult, expressing a sense of powerlessness on the part of the person making it, whose belief that he faces a fascist threat grows in direct proportion to his own inability to make sense of political developments. The insult of ‘fascist’ speaks far more to the insulter’s own sensation of impotence than it does to the insulted’s actual power, or ideology, or ambition.
And yet, let’s have one more try. Let’s make a likely forlorn stab at saying what fascism is. Not to be pedantic, but to differentiate between historic periods; to clarify what happened back then as a way of illustrating that it simply is not happening today. For fascism does not exist now, no matter how much they say it does.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about the ‘Trump is fascism’ argument is how hackneyed it is. This yelling of the f-word at politicians we don’t like has been happening for years. It was said about Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher. For decades, both liberals and leftists have been flinging the word about. In 1969, the American Trotskyist George Lavan Weissman said ‘liberals and even most of those who consider themselves Marxists are guilty of using the word fascist very loosely’. They use it as ‘an epithet… against right-wing figures who they particularly despise’, he said. George Orwell noted a similar overuse, and misuse, of the word as far back as 1944, when fascism most certainly did exist. He called on leftists and others to use the word with ‘circumspection’.
Weissman and Orwell would be horrified by the fascist mania of 2017. There is no circumspection. Orwell was worried that the word would lose its ‘last vestige of meaning’ if people insisted on applying it to everyone they disagreed with – and that has happened. The word is now used with an ahistoricism and thoughtlessness that are genuinely alarming. And among the upper echelons of society, not merely by scruffy protesters or online blowhards. The Archbishop of Canterbury says Trump is part of the ‘fascist tradition’. Prince Charles has warned darkly of a return of the atmosphere of the 1930s, and we all know what that means. ‘Yes, Donald Trump is a fascist’, says New Republic, a magazine that once considered itself a voice of reason among the paranoid style of American political life. But everyone’s paranoid now. Everyone now sees fascists.”
“It has become painfully obvious to all by now that our political discourse in the United States has degenerated into an argument over who the “fascist” is. The Nazis have also recently replaced Russia as the looming bogey man of American political discourse with accusations and counter-accusations of the left and right being the “real” Nazis. The term “Nazi” is used by both sides interchangeably with the term “Fascist” as if these two things were one and the same. Rather than debate ideas or principles, we seem to spend our time arguing over who is or is not a “fascist”. The Democrats say that the Republicans are “fascists”, that President Trump is a “fascist” and the more extreme members of the progressive left have even formed a group called “Antifa”, which is short for “Anti-Fascist”, to combat any Republican, conservative, or whomever they consider at all ‘right-wing’ who are all, to their mind, “fascists”.
THE MAD MONARCHIST, THE FASCIST DEBATE AND CHRISTIANITY
The American Minervan 
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