Fascism vs. Socialism

A comparison of definitions of the terms

The following commentary is based on definitions contained in i Webster's Online Dictionary and in Wikipedia (as of 2011 07 21).

Going by Webster's definitions of fascism and socialism, I can't help but think that the definition of fascism was created to do a bit of white-washing. The definitions are shown in these screenshots:

It is very odd that the second part of the definition of fascism, which stresses "actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality...", is shown there but is not mentioned at all in Webster's definition of socialism.  That is Orwellian, given that the brutality against its people has been a defining feature of socialism throughout history, but especially given that the killing of its people was being undertaken on an industrial scale by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for many decades and was its defining feature since its inception, since long before Mussolini and Hitler rose to power.

It is important to recognize the different extents to which that aspect has been emphasized in the one definition and downplayed in the other, but have a look at Wikipedia. It is somewhat more politically correct than is Webster's, wherefore the differences between the definitions of fascism and socialism are more pronounced and far more intense with respect to making fascism look bad and to painting socialism as being benign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

I tried to parse those definitions, so that I would be able to compare the individual components. The parsing is not that hard to do, but it immediately becomes obvious that, in addition to parsing those definitions, it is absolutely essential to normalize the individual components to establish common denominators that permit to make valid comparisons. The normalizing requires a lot of interpretations, all of which are subject to criticisms, unless a considerable amount of time is spent in justifying how the normalizing was done and what qualitative and quantitative judgments and evaluations were used.

It seems that the task is so complicated that justice can be done to the effort only if it were to be done as an exercise comparable to a doctoral dissertation. Perhaps someone has performed such an analysis, but Wikipedia did not, and neither did Webster's.

I give up. To work on this would require too large a part of the few years remaining of my life. I am not willing to pay that price and will instead keep my eyes open for the work of someone who may have done it already, but a few observations are in order.

One of many obvious differences between socialism and fascism is that socialism will establish state-ownership of property, whereas fascism encourages private ownership of property. It could therefore be argued that the National Socialist German Worker's Party was a fascist party and not a socialist party. I say that while contemplating an economic system such as that in place in Cuba, where one can argue that Cuba is most definitely a national-socialistic regime that is not fascist -- mainly because all along we have been brainwashed with the idea that Cuba is a socialist nation of the communist variety.

However, things become very fuzzy when contemplating other aspects of the respective definitions of fascism and socialism.

It could be argued that all communist regimes are fascist, because they all are dictatorial, or it could be argued that China most certainly has a fascist regime because it is a dictatorship that promotes private property and is therefore not in the least a socialist regime. Are China and most definitely Vietnam not national-socialist, totalitarian regimes? Are they therefore not fascist? After all, everyone of the communist regimes we know and worry about are and have been dictatorships.

Some people commenting on Webster's definition of fascism had absolutely no hesitation in declaring that fascism describes the United States.

It seems that we are meant to conclude that fascist regimes are those that fit the definitions of fascism in Webster's and in Wikipedia to the t, as long as they are not socialist or communist regimes. Of course, one must not forget that those definitions were easily made so precise that they happen to fit the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, while the definitions of socialism very carefully exclude any and all descriptions of brutal, radical, racist and deadly aspects that the definitions of fascism identify with great precision and emphasize.

We are made to believe that it is quite simple, really. Fascism is bad, and communism is good, regardless of the fact that communism exterminated in excess of a 100 million people during the last century. If you don't believe in the benevolence of socialism, well, then just read the definitions of fascism and socialism in Webster's and in Wikipedia. Those definitions reflect the politically-correct consensus, wherefore the objective truth does not matter and must be held at bay. Cooperativeness is stressed over and over in the definitions of socialism, while the definitions of fascism stress totalitarianism or dictatorship. It sure is a good thing that the people in the totalitarian, socialist regimes who were deprived of their civil rights, freedom, property and lives did so cooperatively.  Anyone who swallows that, hook, line and sinker, is not in possession of all of his faculties or is perhaps off his medication.

Writing about the systemic, totalitarian terror of of the USSR, brought fame to Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn but only a minuscule extent of infamy to the ideology of socialism, so little of it that the all-out pursuit of the promotion of socialism is progressing in the so-called free West at an unprecedented rate, with the foremost proponent being radical feminism (a.k.a. socialist- or Marxist-feminism).

It seems that something is fishy and stinks in the global, socialist, totalitarian state. The most pressing issue of modern social evolution is why we cannot cast off the obsession with the promotion of the insanity of creating socialist, cooperative bliss by constructing the totalitarian, global Utopia, Paradise on Earth.

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Posted 2011 07 21
Updates:
2011 07 22 (incorporated screenshots of the dictionary definitions of fascism and socialism and made minor corresponding editorial changes)