Meaningless word and applies only to the movement headed by Mussolini. Only the very, very lazy associate fascism with right-wing politics (or, to use my earlier analogy, anything to the right of Trotsky). There are plenty here with right-wing leanings as there are who are left wing (or very left wing, evidenced by your support of Corbyn). To the best of my knowledge, none of the right wingers here advocate the invasion of Abyssinia, making Catholicism the official religion or draining the Pontine Marshes.

You persist in resorting to cheap, lazy generalisations and, certainly in my eyes, make yourself look a bit dense. It's a shame because you're clearly smarter than that. If we were to actually meet, I'm certain that we'd get on very well. And I say that about very few HOLers, right or left.

Edited by Cucking Funt (06 Jun 2017 11.51pm)

Heaven 17, like yourself, misappropriated the word and applied it inaccurately. Like yourself, they presented themselves as left wing (which is fine) and described anything else as 'fascist'. To paraphrase from Orwell, seeing as you mentioned him, you and they are adopting a "four legs good, two legs bad" stance, a viewpoint Orwell ridiculed. It's insufficient to argue that word meanings change with time. They don't. They just get hijacked with new meanings given. "Gay" means happy, chirpy etc but I can't see how that can now specifically mean "homosexual" and nothing else. Is being homosexual a state of happiness? No, it's a sexual preference. "Fascist" has now been loaded as some kind of argument-killing insult like 'racist' or 'islamophobe'. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so sinister. And that's something else Orwell went to great length to warn us about.

Bender.

Long Good Friday?

Really?! You know far too much to think that's correct:

Fascism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime 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

Oswald Mosley led The British Union of Fascists ...Mosley in 1968: "(Fascism) was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly."

Franco: "Fascism,since that is the word that is used, fascism presents, wherever it manifests itself, characteristics which are varied to the extent that countries and national temperaments vary. It is essentially a defensive reaction of the organism, a manifestation of the desire to live, of the desire not to die, which at certain times seizes a whole people. So each people reacts in its own way, according to its conception of life. Our rising, here, has a Spanish meaning"

Juan Peron: "“Italian Fascism led popular organizations to an effective participation in national life, which had always been denied to the people. Before Mussolini’s rise to power, the nation was on one hand and the worker on the other, and the latter had no involvement in the former. […] In Germany happened exactly the same phenomenon, meaning, an organized state for a perfectly ordered community, for a perfectly ordered population as well: a community where the state was the tool of the nation, whose representation was, under my view, effective. I thought that this should be the future political form, meaning, the true people’s democracy, the true social democracy"

Pick your own potential examples presently on the horizon....

Edited by legaleagle (07 Jun 2017 8.23am)

Our finest generation. Their childhood and adolescence blighted by the struggle and privation of the Depression years. Their best years laid waste to the destruction of WW2. Those that survived dusted themselves off and built the peace and prosperity that is being squandered now.

We are the goon squad and we're going to town. Beep Beep!

Do you think Corbyn will be outside the prison when Choudary comes out, to apologise for the islamophobia that put him in there?
People should scroll through the stuff in the second link and listen to Choudary talking about the killing of Lee Rigby - this is the sort of thing that Gusset thinks you shouldn't get to see.

Edited by hedgehog50 (07 Jun 2017 9.43am)

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]