What is fascism ?

Question

Everybody in my family has tried to explain what fascism is to me except they make it sound more complicated. Can anybody help me?

Answer 1

Fascism -- a right-wing (conservative) model of govt that relies on a rigid hierarchy that imposes totalitarian restrictions, and which is directly opposed to liberalism and democracy.

Put simply, it's a govt that controls people's lives, without people having any say in either the choices they make, or in who gets to make the rules.

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EDIT to EthanM -- try actually looking in a dictionary.

Socialism is an economic model, which regulates money and property ownership. Fascism is a political model, and relates to how laws and rules are made. One has nothing to do with the other, though many fasist govts choose to implement a socialist economic model for additional control.

Answer 2

Darn, I was so looking forward to giving a complicated answer. I was going to go into the Latin origins of the word and everything. :(


Over-simplifying: Fascism is a political philosophy in which the nation is everything, and the individual is nothing.



Ok, now that Ethan (below) and Coragryph have you confused again, let's try this:

Fascism is first and formost Authoritarian or Totalitarian - Fascists vest all power in the state, the government. As a hollow justification for this, they invoke virtual paradodies conservative ideals: ancient tradition, ethinic heritage, grand mythic histories and the like. Thus, Fascists are called conservative or right-wing.

Communism is also Authoritarian, vesting all power in the Party (in a one-party system, that's the same as vesting it in the State), the government. Thier justification is a virtual parody of liberal ideals: the impossible utopian dream of egalitarianism through global revolution. Thus, Communists are called left-wing or even liberal.

Because they evoke opposite ideals, they're often characterized as being opposed, or opposite extremes. But, both are really just Authoritarian, just with different rhetoric. Bullies wearing red as opposed to bullies wearing brown. A distinction without a difference.


(That's probably more than you even want to read and I still haven't gotten to go into Latin.)

Answer 3

Speech codes on American college campuses are one example of fascism.

Answer 4

A system where the free press goes away, and instead of being given information and facts and allowed to draw your own conclusions, you are told what to think. For an example of this in action, see Hollywood movies and documentaries of recent times, especially those that claim to give 'facts' on the global warming myth.

Answer 5

coragryph couldn't be more wrong. Fascism is actually more closely related to Socialism (NAZI - National Socialists). A true Conservative believes in small government a Fascist believes in big government.

Answer 6

Hmm....let's see what I recall from my history books.

The *word* "Fascism" is itself derived from the ancient Roman Latin "Fasces" which was used to describe the way individual sticks of gathered kindling were bound together into a more solid, log-like state. It later would be used at the end of the days of the Roman Republic to describe how Rome itself became an Empire, during the times of the Caesars.

Fast-forward a few thousand years. During the early 20th century, mainly in the 1930s, much of Europe was in economic disarray. Part of the problem was that the Armistice terms that the European powers had agreed to, to end World War I, had rather severly placed the *entire* debt of the previous World War on the shoulders of Germany and Italy. As a result, both of those nations were on the ragged edge of bankruptcy to begin with...

And when the Great Depression hit, world wide, *everyone* suffered. And in particular, Italy and Germany suffered badly, so badly that the ordinary people *voted into power* the first guys who would *promise* ordinary people food on the table, roofs overhead, steady jobs and social order--At ANY Cost.. In Italy this leader was Mussolini, in Germany this was one Adolf Hitler.

And, in the early days both men *delivered* on their promises...essentially they did this by creating a police-state government, with the backing of local big-businesses, that *forced* things to work. It essentially forced people to work at whatever jobs were there, and created a very rigid society wherein people only had *whatever rights* the state gave them. The individual barely meant anything, and the *nation* was *everything*, people were to give their *all* to the *state*. Essentially in order to remain a law-abiding citizen in the early days of those societies, you *had* to work at the job you were assigned, and *had* to support the current regime for *Life*. But it *did* in fact stabilize the economy, provide people with jobs (either military or industrial) and did restore social order (on pain of open and public execution).

Of course, things went downhill from there. Both Italy and Germany fought together in World War II. They had to--warfare against the rest of their neighbors, and then the rest of the world, was the only way they could *keep their system going*. It was the only way they could keep their military going, keep their big businesses on the government's side, *and also* keep people emotionally manipulated and under control (either outraged or terrified). And *of course* Adolf Hitler himself was a diseased, racist madman (he spent a long time dying of syphilis--a disease that will eventually ravage the mind if not treated), while Mussolini wasn't a lot better, letting the businesses demand and take more and more control, to the point of taking Italy out of the war early.

But I digress. The point is this.

It all goes back to that ancient *bundle of sticks* from the Roman days. Those sticks didn't all *choose* to be bound together, and they surely wouldn't *choose* to be burnt together in a fire, would they?

*That* is the thing with fascism. As a government, it is essentially the polar opposite of what happens with Soviet Union or Russian-styled Communism. In Communism, the government forms a police-state, a dictatorship, in the name of taking power *away from* the Rich People and *away from* Big Businesses.

In Fascism, all government power, all *police-state* government power that is, is *Given Away* TO the Rich People and TO Big Businesses. And in the process, the police-state then sees fit to *bind* people together, like so many sticks or so much kindling, by creating rules so strict that for most folks, to obey the law means one of two things:

--Be a slave and work in the factories, or
--Be a soldier and march off to war to die.

And of course a fascist state is *going* to put way more effort into the military, nationalist side of it--the warfare thing--just to keep people pumped up and on "the right side". Because nobody likes to admit to being made a slave. Nobody wants to admit that they are *nothing* and that the State is *everything* in their lives, legally and politically.

Catch is: You cannot keep a fascist state going without a war going on. Eventually people will see through the manipulation--outraging some people while terrorizing others--and call for a stop to the police-state measures.

A fascist state always has to have some enemy to crush, always, even if it's another ethnicity within your own nation--like Germany's Jews--or a semi-fictional Media construct made mostly of one's worst possible stereotypes--like Druggies, "Islamo-fascists" or the Dreaded Liberal.

But hey, don't take my word for it.

Let me scare up a link for you, be right back. ^_^

Answer 7

This explains it perfectly.

http://www.bushflash.com/14.html

Watch it yourself and decide.