I’m trudging through a book on Marxism and Fascism. It’s a good read. I’ve just been doing a lot of other things. Picking at it. But what I’ve gleaned so far reinforces details from other sources. Fascism isn’t just anything to the right of Socialism, which is everything.
During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Chinese Communists and their water carriers in the West adopted the idea that everything to the Right of Mao was fascism, including Soviet Communism. Who knew there was something further Left until Mao?
I’m still wading through the debate to see where it evolved from there, but put simply, any system that was not Mao’s was fascist, and Mao might not like where things went after him. His ideological ancestors have adopted profit-driven production with “Chinese Characteristics.” In other words, fascism.
But before that, when China was Mao and Mao was China, Russian Communists were bleeping fascists despite having no private property and total government control of the means of production. The whole lot of them were little Hitlers corrupted by the allure of capitalism. In fact, capitalism in any form is fascist, which, if you survey the 21st-century narrative battlefield, explains a lot (except the Chinese Characteristics).
Most of us knew that or suspected it. Antifa was born in Germany of socialists and nationalists to court leftists as far left as they. The breadcrumbs are not difficult to follow. But origin has often been a sticky point. Not Antifa’s, but the idea that Fascism is a right-wing construct which is only true if you think like Mao.
The American left has adopted the same notion. Everything that is not their thing is Fascism which is amusing because they are about as fascist a thing as one can be.