People misunderstand fascism. It’s not a political ideology. It’s a dark side of human nature that must always be repressed.

I almost laughed out loud as I read this. Correctly stating that people misunderstand fascism only to immediately prove your own point is embarrassing, and boiling it down to human misbehaviour is simply not useful.

I can agree that fascism demonstrated how complex human behavior is: not many of us want to admit that plenty of ordinary people willingly supported fascism and that even the most atrocious fascists were still humans, but somehow I doubt that this is what the author had in mind. Calling fascism ‘a dark side of human nature’ is much too vague to be meaningful.

Note how fascism doesn’t really have a consistent definition though. It is much more of a constellation of political traits that serve towards an end.

This is a classic oversimplification. Initially, yes, the Fascists did try to appeal to the lower classes, but we can see that that was a cynical ploy since the Fascists firmly sided with the bourgeoisie once it promoted them to institutional power, for the simple reason that the haute-bourgeoisie is the ruling class. The self-contradictory appeals to various classes was a natural consequence of fascism’s predominantly petty bourgeois base.

It’s a shame that these types seem more interested in masturbatory philosophizing rather than examining episodes from the Fascist era. When I emphasised that militarism is crucial to fascism, I was worried that I was only kicking at an open door because it just seemed so obvious. Now that I’ve seen Fedditors saying nothing about fascism’s militarism, I can rest easy knowing that my thread was necessary after all.