RUTHFULLY YOURS

The most curious thing about the political class’s war in defence of truth is that it coexists with a war against freedom of speech. In one breath, our betters, whether it’s the technocrats of the EU or broadsheet thinkers, bemoan a crisis of truth, claiming that a combination of demagoguery and populist myth-making has propelled the modern West into a ‘post-truth’ era. Yet in the next they express disdain for the ideal of unfettered free thought and debate. Whether they’re instituting laws against ‘hate speech’ or enforcing social stigma against such things as ‘climate-change denial’ or ‘Europhobia’, they exhibit a palpable discomfort with the idea of a fully open public sphere in which nothing is unsayable.

We might even say that in 2017, there are two things that really animate the political and cultural elites of the West: first, their self-styled urge to defend truth, their pose as warriors for honesty against the misinformation of the new populists; and secondly, their agitation with unfettered discussion and with the expression of what they consider to be hateful or outré views. This is striking, because truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all. It is dogma. It represents an assumption of intellectual and moral infallibility rather than a winning and proving of it in the only way that counts: through free public contestation. That our rulers both claim to love truth and fear freedom of speech utterly explodes the pretensions of their moral panic about a ‘post-truth’ era. It’s not truth they want to protect – it’s the authority of their prejudice.

Anybody genuinely concerned with the idea of truth, with deepening humanity’s understanding of itself, nature and society, with encouraging the deployment of reason in order to render the world more knowable, ought to have a natural and in fact quite fierce disposition to freedom of thought and speech. The two go hand in hand. Actually, the one — truth — is reliant on the other — freedom. This point has been consistently argued by liberals throughout the modern period. John Milton, in his passionate plea in 1644 against the licensing of the press in England, famously argued that we should ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?’ To guard the truth, or what we presume to be true, from free, open discussion is to do truth an ‘injury’, said Milton — it ‘misdoubts her strength’.

Truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all.

Censorship, Milton argued, is the implacable enemy of truth. In fact it is the ‘stop of Truth’. Repressing the utterance or publication of ‘scandalous, seditious, and libellous’ material is often done in the name of preserving truth, he said, but in fact it commits two wrongs against truth. First, in assuming the public should not have to think for itself, and in fact cannot do so, it weakens the public’s intellectual and moral capacities, dulling their ability autonomously to distinguish truth from falsehood. In ‘disexercising and blunting our abilities’, censorship represents a ‘discouragement of all learning’, said Milton. ‘Our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs’, he said. That is, we must use our mental and moral muscles, our faculty of judgement, as surely as we use our physical muscles, and censorship prevents us from doing that. And secondly, the censorship of scandal or sedition or ‘evil’ shrinks the sphere of public discussion and thus puts off the potential discovery of greater truths, he argued — by ‘hindring and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civill Wisdome’.

So censorship is hostile to truth both in its implicit doubting of the public’s capacity for critical, truthful thought and in its weakening of the kind of conditions in which old ideas might come to be superseded by newer, more truthful ones. Milton strikingly argued that if someone thinks something is true simply because he has been told it’s true, then this isn’t ‘truth’ in any meaningful sense. He wrote: ‘If [a man] beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, [then] though his belief be true, the very truth he holds becomes his heresie.’ Why? Because he has ‘gladly [posted] off to another’ the ‘charge and care’ of his beliefs and worldview. That is, he has outsourced his own moral universe to a higher authority; his belief in truth is passive and childish; truth has been given to him, not discovered or learned by him. CONTINUE AT SITE

Boston

Jews have a way with catastrophe; the hundreds of images in “Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross” are testimony to it. Ross said, “Having an official camera, I was able to capture all the tragic period in the¼ Lodz Ghetto. I did it knowing that if I were caught my family and I would be tortured and killed.” Ross (1910-1991) was one of the only two Jews in the Ghetto allowed to have cameras; they were required to take pictures to be used by the Nazis for propaganda, but each also surreptitiously documented the deterioration and removal of the Ghetto’s inhabitants. It is a tradition that goes back to the prophet Jeremiah crying, “Alas,” over the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Through July 30

Very little is known for sure about Ross. He was apparently born in Warsaw and may have had a career there as a photojournalist of some sort. In 1939 he joined the Polish army, and when it was defeated he ended up in Lodz. In the middle of present-day Poland, Lodz was an important industrial city with a mixed population of Poles, Germans and Jews. With the Nazi conquest, the Jews were moved into a blighted section and physically segregated from the rest of the city. All Jews, eventually well over the original 160,000, were made to wear a yellow Star of David sewn on their clothes. The Germans found Ross’s name on the Photographers Association list and confiscated his camera, but when the Judenrat, the “Jewish council” set up by the Nazis for inhabitants to administer the Ghetto, was established, the camera was returned.

Ross was responsible for taking identity photos, recording the activities of the Judenrat, and documenting the factories established in the Ghetto in the hope that the Nazis would spare Jews doing productive work. Examples of these pictures were included in the 6,000 negatives Ross buried in the fall of 1944. “I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy….I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.” The negatives were in metal canisters placed in wooden boxes, but when they were retrieved in 1945, water had ruined half of them. The swirls and signs of deterioration on the prints made from the still usable ones are emblematic of the harrowing experiences of their subjects. CONTINUE AT SITE

Despite Sophocles declamation that “no lie ever reaches old age,” we will likely never know the truth about who is responsible for all that has been written about Trump and Russia, nor the truth of the accusation that Obama tapped Trump’s phone. FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts, at the request of the President, can implement wiretaps opaquely in the murky recesses of the intelligence world. Did Trump, or someone on his team conspire with Putin to affect the election, as has been claimed by some in the media and by many Democrats? Did former President Obama or his minions spy on Trump and his associates, with the goal of undermining his Presidency, as Mr. Trump’s recent tweets suggest?

It has always beggared belief to conclude that Putin would have preferred Trump (a political unknown and cited as mercurial) to Mrs. Clinton, a woman who had been part of an administration that had given him little push-back in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria. What we do know is that from the first hours after an election that surprised them, Democrats have been crafting a story to explain their (to them) inexplicable loss. Not willing to accept the possibility that responsibility may be theirs – a flawed candidate and/or identity policies that ignored middle class working Americans – they settled on Russia and Putin as scapegoats.

It was an inspired choice. Russia had become Mr. Obama’s nemesis. Mr. Putin, whatever his faults (and they are many), is not stupid. Remember how President Obama belittled Mitt Romney in 2012 when the latter suggested that Russia was the greatest threat we faced. Remember Mr. Obama’s comments to Mr. Putin that same year: “After the election I will have more flexibility.” Over the past several years Mr. Putin out-maneuvered Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and John Kerry, in places like Crimea, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Syria. Accusing the Trump camp of colluding with Russians deflected criticism of the Obama legacy. We all know that it is in Mr. Putin’s interest to discredit democracy. We know that the Russians had the means to interfere in the election, because they had hacked Mrs. Clinton’s private server, as well as that of the Democratic National Committee. And, because of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, we also know that our government has the means to listen in on and record phone calls, messages and e-mails. Regardless of what is the truth, Mr. Putin must be smiling at the discord he is accused of having sown.

Published in: https://spectator.org/change-in-our-time/
From Heraclitus to the present, historians and philosophers addressed the issue of change. Is change built into the nature of society or is it a mirage that reflects a different side of sameness? It would appear that there are years in the so-called modern age that suggest a departure from the past: 1789 and The French Revolution; 1914 the Great War and the End of Innocence; 1939 and the onset of World War II. Although it is too early to argue with any certainty, 2016-2017 may be a candidate for historic proportions, since the institutions and their philosophical underpinnings which accounted for relative global stability are in disarray. The world is turning and not necessarily on its axis. “The wheel keeps turning the sky’s rearranging.”Alas, the rearrangement brings into focus an uncertain future in large part because the political and economic institutions such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Union have lost or are losing their legitimacy. In fact, liberal internationalism – a belief that nations can share “rules of the road”- is undergoing challenge from a newly emergent nationalism. Not only is President Trump calling for America First, but the nationalist sentiment has gained traction across the European continent and into the Asian heartland. Rules are being renegotiated or dismissed and the pattern for going forward remains unclear.

Accelerating this percolation is technological innovation that has produced a social media of narcissism and personal fulfillment that virtually excludes any other pursuits. Secularization across the board has elevated “me” into the position of a transcendent force. How does one manage a society that does not recognize the limits of freedom? How can order be maintained without modesty and humility?

As Jacques Ellul once announced, “technology exists because technology exists.” Presumably it is a force of its own, resistant to the controls of manners, morals or human welfare. If in a Schumpeterian equation there is as much destruction as creation, will employment be a privilege? How do you deal with those left behind? A guaranteed income? Rewards for the idle? The puzzle parts seek a framework.

If trade deals are filtered through the prism of job creation, will tariffs be imposed to equalize comparative advantage? And if so, would these tariffs be applied internationally – what is now called import taxes? National assertiveness, with its broad political appeal, could result in a diminished world order or even global depression. Admittedly Smoot Hawley has faded from public memory and it was not the actual cause of the Great Depression as many have conceded, but it did exacerbate a declining world economy.

Artificial intelligence is already addressing these issues without the requisite policy constraints. Most manufacturing jobs will soon be obsolescent. Even higher level positions in medicine will be rendered unnecessary. These are changes advancing incrementally. A person with cancer might consult an oncologist today, but in short order he will ask a computer bank for the best treatment based on all the empirical evidence of his disease. Of course, this example cannot be generalized to all jobs, for society will probably need some work. The question is who gets rewarded and who doesn’t and who is left out of the equation completely.

While the change in the past was largely political and economic, the change we are in is the tail wagging the cultural shifts. The loss of confidence in institutional foundations moves down a slope of cultural realignment. When President Trump denounces political correctness, he speaks to a portion of the population largely forgotten by elites and resentful at the adversarial dominance of the “chattering class.” President Trump is an unlikely voice of the disenfranchised, but there you have it. The confidence deficit fills the air as people come to question the leadership in their nations; change will be unhinged from notions of the past.

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https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/03/09/bill-clinton-warns-current-trend-could-take-us-to-the-edge-of-o/21878907/

Want to hear a joke? Here is the punchline: Bill Clinton gave a talk at the Brookings Institute ….
He went on to say, “…we have to find a way to bring simple, personal decency and trust back to our politics.”

The month ended with President Trump addressing a joint session of Congress. Eloquence may not be not his forte, but last night he was. He spoke for just over an hour and was interrupted with applause 96 times. It was, in my opinion, a home run of a speech. He was conciliatory toward Democrats, uplifted the American people and evoked empathy with guests he had brought, especially toward the widow of Ryan Owens, a U.S. Navy Seal killed last month in Yemen.

While global stock markets moved higher – the DJIA were up 4.7% for the month – clouds gathered on the horizon. This is a weather pattern we have seen before; however, man-made efforts caused them to temporarily dissipate, but not disappear. I write, of course, of the surge in government debt and obligations, which are growing faster than underlying economies – a situation that must, at some point, end. Adding to (and prolonging) the problem has been the effective socialization of debt, as central banks transferred private obligations to their public balance sheets. The Fed has stopped its QE programs, but the ECB continues. In 2008, such tactics were justified; but, to the extent they are used now to maintain social welfare benefits that would otherwise be unaffordable, they may delay, but will not prevent, future storms.

The problem is particularly acute in the EU, especially in those nations unflatteringly referred to as PIGS – Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. While Spain’s prospects appear better than the others, all are experiencing financial hardship and all are facing the demographic challenge of fertility rates far below replacement rates. Declining birthrates is one reason why Europe has been open to Muslim immigration. Somebody has to produce babies and if the native population won’t they must be imported; for economic growth is difficult when populations shrink and productivity is absent.

These trends, which have produced substandard economic growth, were instinctively understood by those in the UK who voted for Brexit and Trump voters in the U.S. They have been misread by elites throughout the West who seem as removed from reality as were those Russian aristocrats who sipped lemonade, as the guns of 2017 harkened the coming Revolution. Keep in mind, Brexit and Trump are symptoms, not causes. The causes were a consequence of hearts bigger than heads, of sensibilities that exorcised sense.

Insane,” “Incompetent,” “Liar,” “Unfocused,” “Unhinged,” “Petulant,” “Disgraceful,” “Sexist,” “Misogynist,” “Xenophobic,” even “Hitlerian” according to one CNN reporter. The names Mr. Trump has been called and the charges against him are as relentless as they are incoherent. They culminate in the claim he is impeachable, according to Representative Keith Ellison. The New Republic suggested he is suffering from neurosyphilis, thus mentally unqualified for the office. Some, like the intellect-challenged Sally Kohn, a lawyer and community organizer, have called for a special election following the impeachments of both Trump and Pence. These are not protests. These are attempts to sabotage a duly elected President.

It is fine to disagree with Mr. Trump and the policies he was elected to pursue. It is okay to demonstrate and to protest. Civil disobedience is part of our history and culture. But to claim that the man who wants to shrink the federal government, who wants to emasculate the power of unaccountable federal agencies, who wants to ensure that Congress enacts laws, the Executive executes them and that the judiciary upholds them is somehow putting the nation on the path to authoritarianism is laughable. Over the past several decades, our federal government has become the Sheriff of Nottingham. Trump was seen by the millions who voted for him as Robin Hood, a man who would return power to the people. This is not to dismiss or minimize risks to democracies. They exist. But Mr. Trump wants to make government smaller and more accountable and the people more responsible – the opposite of authoritarian rule.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t be surprised by the reaction to the President. Over the past two years, Mr. Trump alienated the establishment: Republicans in the primaries, Democrats during the general election, and throughout – the media, academia, public sector union heads, big banks and big business CEOs, federal bureaucrats, the intelligence community and supranational organizations. He upset illegal Mexican immigrants. He angered Muslims who refuse to admit the presence of Islamic extremists in their midst. He is enemy to elitists and to all who prefer the comfort of political correctness to the reality of truth.

What he attracted were the millions of Americans who believe in the dignity of work, but find opportunities limited. He appealed to those who see government as master and themselves as servant. He drew in those who believe in a Christian-Judeo culture, but whose moral sense has been belittled by condescending hypocrites of relativism. He bonded with the 63 million voters who felt left behind by a government focused on self-perpetuation, a government that had lost its sense of service.

The Left, looking to subvert Mr. Trump’s Presidency, may consider themselves followers of Nelson Mandela, who famously said about sabotage: “I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had risen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.”

But that does not describe the United States and it is not what the Left is doing. We are not an oppressive nation. We are a nation that has combined free-market fundamentals with democratic principles. We honor freedom, property rights and the rule of law. Despite deeply-held differences, we all know that the United States stands for those values and lauds that success. It is not the ends that separate us; it is the means to achieve those ends. Many of us disagreed with Mr. Obama from the start, but none of us tried to vitiate his administration. We didn’t write or speak of assassination, military coups or forced resignation. No members of the intelligence community withheld intelligence because they deemed him unfit. No federal employees, in agencies like the EPA, resisted his administration because they didn’t approve his policies.

Many years ago, when I graduated from college, a friend and classmate got her first job in the visitor’s service of the United Nations. There were two perks. One was a free parking space and the other privileges to the debates in the General Assembly. Thanks to this I attended many sessions in the gallery as her guest. The “distinguished” members most often started their disquisitions by telling a humorous anecdote from their respective nations. They suffered greatly in translation but I can offer the punch line to a real UN joke–namely The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, UNRWA was established by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949 to carry out relief and works programs for Palestine refugees. The Agency began operations on 1 May 1950. In June 2017, its mandate and funding come up for review. It deserves to be shut down.

First of all, it is a numbers racket. According to its own statement: “When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.”

Even if we accept the questionable number of 750,000 Arabs who left Israel, how is it that sixty-seven years later–again from the home page, we read: “UNRWA is unique in terms of its long-standing commitment to one group of refugees. It has contributed to the welfare and human development of four generations of Palestine refugees, defined as ‘persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.’ The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.“

Again, in its words: “UNRWA is confronted with an increased demand for services resulting from a growth in the number of registered Palestine refugees, the extent of their vulnerability and their deepening poverty.”

Since World War Two, hundreds of millions of displaced persons from every continent have been relocated. They have had to learn new languages, new alphabets and adapt to new cultural mores. They have become participants in the politics of their adopted countries. How is it then that only Palestinian Arabs merit assistance? Furthermore, why has the status of “refugee” become a heritable entitlement, bequeathed from generation to generation?

When members of the media traipse through the camps, they are seldom shown nearby housing with facilities and running water. Instead local Arabs stage themselves near running sewers, cynically using children as props. As soon as the journalists move on to the next stop in their bash-Israel “fact finding” tour, the cast moves back to their updated lodgings.

Today the world is confronted and affronted by a tsunami of refugees from the Middle East. They flee jihad and tribal and civil warfare. The demand for haven and social services is enormous and yet UNRWA services only Palestinian Arabs in camps in Gaza (why Gaza, which is now ruled by Arabs?), Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

In the midst of the mayhem in Syria, on Feb. 1, 2017 Mohammed Abdi Adar, a Somali national, assumed his duties as Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the Syrian Arab Republic. He describes his mandate thus: “It is an important opportunity to serve Palestine refugees in Syria,” said Mr. Abdi Adar. “I look forward to working with the Syrian Government and other partners to help alleviate the suffering of Palestine refugees, who like the Syrians have experienced the dire consequences of the crisis over the last six years.” Why only the “Palestinians?” This is a form of “profiling” that raises no hackles among Western hypocrites.

And UNWRA’s so called relief is a canard since in its own words, conditions have worsened: “Over the years, these camps have transformed from temporary ‘tent cities’ into hyper-congested masses of multi-story buildings with narrow alleys, characterized by high concentrations of poverty and extreme overcrowding. The camps are considered to be among the densest urban environments in the world, but because camp structures were built for temporary use, over the decades the buildings have become overcrowded, critically substandard and in many cases life-threatening.”

Why after 67 years are Palestinian Arabs a priority when hundreds of thousands are facing death and violence perpetrated by Arabs on other Arabs?

Deuteronomy, if taken literally, would seem to prescribe execution as the solution to delinquent children. Ah, but then there are those informed commentaries and qualifications, which say the opposite. The problem with Islam is that none can nor dare filter Koranic literalism.
I switch on TV. Experienced interviewer Andrew Knut is posing this loaded question to a representative of a rabbinic council. Should you have your rebellious son stoned to death, he asks?

As you can imagine, this startles the rabbi. What the heck do you mean?

Well here it is, says Knut. I am reading from a Jewish Bible; in particular from Deuteronomy chapter 21 verses 18 to 21. He duly reads the passage.

“If a man will have a wayward and rebellious son, who does not hearken to the voice of his father and the voice of his mother, and they discipline him, but he does not hearken to them; then his father and his mother shall grasp him and take him out to the elders of the city, ‘This son of ours is wayward and rebellious; he does not hearken to our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard’. All the men of his city shall pelt him with stones and he shall die…”

Ah, now, yes, you have to understand the whole process, the rabbi protests. Stoning is very much a last resort. A last resort indeed, he emphasises. First, you must as parents hug you son and buy him presents to convince him to give up his rebellious ways. If this fails then you must give him a good talking to and warn him of the consequences of his bad behaviour. Make him sleep in the shed. Only when all of this fails do you hand him over to be stoned to death. So you see there is nothing at all to see here.

Knut is not mollified. Well, it still seems a tad extreme to me, he says. Surely you must disavow this passage in your Bible? It is the only civilised thing to do. Don’t you think?

OK, you got me! None of the above actually happened. But I guess you guessed that. What is true, however, is my citation of the passage in Deuteronomy. In my Jewish Bible there is an accompanying annotation. It explains that the Sages (great Jewish scholars of old) constrain the applicability of the passage to someone who will “degenerate into a monstrous human being” and moreover “state that there never was and never will be a capital case involving such a son.”

Here is my non-scholarly take. The Jewish religion and, by extension, the Christian religion (as it, too, encompasses the Old Testament) are willing to deviate from taking God at His literal Word, as it is recorded in the Bible. Literalists, they are not. As a Christian, I am personally happy with this. There is a fair amount in the Bible that it’s best not to take too literally. Inspired and guided by God though it is; we should be cognisant that flawed men of their time wrote it; and others, also flawed, selected, translated and compiled its various parts.

Therefore, for example, I remain open to the possibility that a man lying with a man might not be regarded by God as an abomination (Leviticus, 18:22). And, to move to the New Testament and St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (5:22), I seriously doubt that wives “should submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” According to David Horrell (An Introduction to the Study of Paul), this letter might not have been written by Paul at all but by a later disciple of his, concerned about the prominence of women in the early Christian church. Who knows? In any event, in all things, we should not forsake our wits. God gave them to us.

And now to something completely different; to something that actually happened. The path-breaking Andrew Bolt asked Keysar Trad, representing the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, what he thought of Koranic verse IV: 34. Why do I say ‘path-breaking’? Because this is only the second time I have witnessed a commentator quote the Koran to an Islamic representative as a way to put him or her on the spot and forestall the usual distractive spin — that ‘religion of peace’ sophistry. And the first time? That was Bolt too.

The verse is clear enough, though it varies in detail depending on the version of the Koran. Mine is the Pickthall version. “Men are in charge of women,” it says. There is nothing much different here from the passage in Ephesians that I referred to above. However, the Koranic passage goes on to say, “As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, and banish them to beds apart and scourge them.” Often scourge is written as “beat”, which sounds a bit less barbarous. But, whichever word is used, this is not a good look.

First, let’s clarify the meaning of fascism, as it has become a word that’s tossed reflexively like a grenade at Donald Trump or at anyone who supports him or who challenges, Progressivism, or the morality of the welfare state. It sounds scary and package-deals so many political and social realms that have little or nothing to do with fascism. Brendan O’Neill of Spiked wrote in a much needed analysis “What Fascism Is, and What It Isn’t”:

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.

O’Neill is a tad off-track concerning how and why “right-wingers” use the term fascism. They are a bit more perceptive of the Left’s assertions, ends, and methods (whereas leftists are blind to the consequences of their beliefs), and there’s no reason why they should refrain from calling face-masked goons fascists. Rampaging leftists walk like ducks, and so are ducks. They’re just as not nattily garbed as Nazi Brown Shirts or Fascist Black Shirts.

However, I left this comment on O’Neill’s column:

Ask a true contemporary “fascist” – i.e., one of the Berkeley rioters and window smashers, or one of the Women’s March pussy hat wearers – what fascism is, and all you’ll get for an answer is a rapid blinking of the eyes, a careening, stuttering search for words, or some hackneyed warbling about Hitler; it would do you no good to remind the person that “Fascism” was not the same as Hitler’s Nazism, and that the only true or original Fascist was Benito Mussolini, and that the term is derived from the Roman fasces, a bundle of elm or birch rods with an ax head protruding from them, carried by servants of the Roman Senate. Today’s “activists” – violent or otherwise – are woefully ignorant of the meaning of the words they use or throw at their enemies, and don’t care.

Let’s look at some definitions of fascism.

The Merriam-Webster definition:

….a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition [e.g., censorship or punishment; my addition]

The Business Dictionary definition:

Political ideology that imposes strict social and economical measures as a method of empowering the government and stripping citizens of rights. This authoritative system of government is usually headed by an absolute dictator who keeps citizens suppressed via acts of violence and strict laws that govern the people. The most noted form of Fascism was implemented under Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who both stripped citizens of their rights and maintained strict regimes that resulted in the deaths of thousands of humans. Some of the defining characteristics of fascism are: (1) racism, (2) militarism, (3) dictatorship, and (4) destructive nationalistic policies.

Auburn University definition:

A class of political ideologies (and historical political regimes) that takes its name from the movement led by Benito Mussolini that took power in Italy in 1922. Mussolini’s ideas and practices directly and indirectly influenced political movements in Germany (especially the Nazi Party), Spain (Franco’s Falange Party), France, Argentina, and many other European and non-European countries right up to the present day.

The different “fascist” movements and regimes have varied considerably in their specific goals and practices, but they are usually said to be characterized by several common features:

Militant nationalism, proclaiming the racial and cultural superiority of the dominant ethnic group and asserting that group’s inherent right to a special dominant position over other peoples in both the domestic and the international order
The adulation of a single charismatic national leader said to possess near superhuman abilities and to be the truest representation of the ideals of the national culture, whose will should therefore literally be law
Emphasis on the absolute necessity of complete national unity, which is said to require a very powerful and disciplined state organization (especially an extensive secret police and censorship apparatus), unlimited by constitutional restrictions or legal requirements and under the absolute domination of the leader and his political movement or party
Militant anti-Communism coupled with the belief in an extreme and imminent threat to national security from powerful and determined Communist forces both inside and outside the country
Contempt for democratic socialism, democratic capitalism, liberalism, and all forms of individualism as weak, degenerate, divisive and ineffective ideologies leading only to mediocrity or national suicide
Glorification of physical strength, fanatical personal loyalty to the leader, and general combat-readiness as the ultimate personal virtues
A sophisticated apparatus for systematically propagandizing the population into accepting these values and ideas through skilled manipulation of the mass media, which are totally monopolized by the regime once the movement comes to power
A propensity toward pursuing a militaristic and aggressive foreign policy
Strict regulation and control of the economy by the regime through some form of corporatist economic planning in which the legal forms of private ownership of industry are nominally preserved but in which both workers and capitalists are obliged to submit their plans and objectives to the most detailed state regulation and extensive wage and price controls, which are designed to insure the priority of the political leadership’s objectives over the private economic interests of the citizenry. Therefore under fascism most of the more important markets are allowed to operate only in a non-competitive, cartelized, and governmentally “rigged” fashion.

The Encyclopedia Britannica begins its definition with:

There has been considerable disagreement among historians and political scientists about the nature of fascism. Some scholars, for example, regard it as a socially radical movement with ideological ties to the Jacobins of the French Revolution, whereas others see it as an extreme form of conservatism inspired by a 19th-century backlash against the ideals of the Enlightenment. Some find fascism deeply irrational, whereas others are impressed with the rationality with which it served the material interests of its supporters. Similarly, some attempt to explain fascist demonologies as the expression of irrationally misdirected anger and frustration, whereas others emphasize the rational ways in which these demonologies were used to perpetuate professional or class advantages. Finally, whereas some consider fascism to be motivated primarily by its aspirations—by a desire for cultural “regeneration” and the creation of a “new man”—others place greater weight on fascism’s “anxieties”—on its fear of communist revolution and even of left-centrist electoral victories.

One reason for these disagreements is that the two historical regimes that are today regarded as paradigmatically fascist—Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany—were different in important respects. In Italy, for example, anti-Semitism was officially rejected before 1934, and it was not until 1938 that Mussolini enacted a series of anti-Semitic measures in order to solidify his new military alliance with Hitler. Another reason is the fascists’ well-known opportunism—i.e., their willingness to make changes in official party positions in order to win elections or consolidate power. Finally, scholars of fascism themselves bring to their studies different political and cultural attitudes, which often have a bearing on the importance they assign to one or another aspect of fascist ideology or practice. Secular liberals, for example, have stressed fascism’s religious roots; Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars have emphasized its secular origins; social conservatives have pointed to its “socialist” and “populist” aspects; and social radicals have noted its defense of “capitalism” and “elitism.”

For these and other reasons, there is no universally accepted definition of fascism. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of general characteristics that fascist movements between 1922 and 1945 tended to have in common.