BY PAUL NEWALL

Recently I got called a fascist on social media. I had to chuckle despite the insult. As a former Trotskyite I must have gone full circle! Then someone mentioned on the thread that the name caller didn’t know what the term meant. When I thought about this, I visited some home truths.

The word fascist is the second most overused in the English language, just after racist. Often they are used together. The lefties throwing around this word willy-nilly are nothing short of hypocrites. Why?

Fascism owes its origins to the Latin term fascismo – a bundle of sticks bound together by leather straps that had a number of uses for Roman legionnaires. The idea behind that is that a single stick can be bent or snapped but a collection of sticks will support each other.

The more perceptive of you might notice that this argument is the basis of every trade union movement in history (united we stand ….) so the TU movement and fascism have the same primary rationale. The concept of a fascist state has Giovanni Gentile as a father figure who formulated the idea that the workers and the state should be as one, that the state should not be a passive night-watchman but a shaper of beliefs to mould the working class into model citizens. When I was a Trotskyite we called this shaping “democratic centralism”, whereby a duly elected central committee would formulate policy and every disciple would parrot from exactly the same script.

Any historians out there might mention that the Nazi party, known locally as Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NASDAP) expelled or killed socialists during its rise to power. This is true – it got rid of the Marxists but the overall left-wing tilt of the party remained in place. Instead of seizing the means of production, Hitler and to a lesser degree Mussolini, looked to harness capitalists to benefit first the state and second the people.

Fascists worship the state and do not tolerate dissension, so there is no free speech and no free thought. Now I don’t consider myself a philosophical genius but other than every business of consequence being owned by the state, I can’t see a great deal of difference between big state communism and fascism, certainly from the position of the average man in the street.

Hitler cherry-picked from a basket of racial theories which experiments in concentration camps amazingly “confirmed” in much the same way that Stalin demanded science proved that his brand of socialism was better for the future of mankind. Hitler used the threat of a Jewish cabal seeking power and used race theory to empower himself, just as current postmodernists use critical race theory – which includes Jews as the puppet masters for the racist whites as their selling point. It’s no coincidence that the Jews get the honour of being fall guys for both philosophies, as no doubt tomorrow’s EHRC report on Corbyn’s Labour will highlight shortly.

Any political school that doesn’t allow deviance of free thought is wrong. It doesn’t much matter if they want control of industry or ownership, you still get hurt if you put up resistance. Not everyone should be forced into a Trotskyite party for the joy of it just to appreciate how wrong humans can be.

For any authoritarian movement to prosper there has to be a threat that is prescient and all consuming. Hitler had his Zionist cabals, Lenin had Capitalism. Today’s postmodernist has a large armoury of scare stories to pass to the gullible – climate change, the white patriarchy, Jews and now Covid.

It’s a free society we inhabit. We can either drink the Koolaid of left-wing ideologues or we allow our society to grow and prosper based on classical liberal principles. This choice is coming up the tracks with the speed and force of a freight train and we should all choose wisely, using History as a warning.

Paul Newall is a child of the 1960’s from a traditional Labour-supporting household. Paul dabbled with Trotskyism in the 1980’s but then “grew up and thanks to having responsibilities I slowly migrated across the political spectrum until instead of hating Maggie Thatcher I admired her for beating my side in the miners’ strike”.