How many times do I have to teach you this lesson, old man?
Fascism is a made up word. It literally did not exist until it was invented specifically to describe a very particular set of political beliefs. Any other definition is just some blowhard co-opting a word because using accurate terminology is too hard for the majority of people with kneejerk based opinions.
This is the definition of Fascism.
This is what the creator of the word - Benito freakin Mussolini - created it to represent, and this is the ideology that fueled the ur-example of a Fascist state. Nazism evolved out of Fascism and falls within the category in the same way that Maoism evolved out of Stalinism, but lets not confuse unique attributes of Maoism with it’s ideological antecedent Stalinsm or Marxism and likewise not confuse unique aspects of Nazism, Neo-Fascism, or any other ideological descendent of Fascism like the direction of contemporary American psuedo-conservatives with Fascism itself.
Likewise, let’s be firm in smacking anyone who says this…
REJECTION OF MARXISM
Such a conception of life makes Fascism the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else.
That the vicissitudes of economic life - discoveries of raw materials, new technical processes, and scientific inventions - have their importance, no one denies; but that they suffice to explain human history to the exclusion of other factors is absurd. Fascism believes now and always in sanctity and heroism, that is to say in acts in which no economic motive - remote or immediate - is at work. Having denied historic materialism, which sees in men mere puppets on the surface of history, appearing and disappearing on the crest of the waves while in the depths the real directing forces move and work, Fascism also denies the immutable and irreparable character of the class struggle which is the natural outcome of this economic conception of history; above all it denies that the class struggle is the preponderating agent in social transformations. Having thus struck a blow at socialism in the two main points of its doctrine, all that remains of it is the sentimental aspiration, old as humanity itself-toward social relations in which the sufferings and sorrows of the humbler folk will be alleviated. But here again Fascism rejects the economic interpretation of felicity as something to be secured socialistically, almost automatically, at a given stage of economic evolution when all will be assured a maximum of material comfort. Fascism denies the materialistic conception of happiness as a possibility, and abandons it to the economists of the mid-eighteenth century. This means that Fascism denies the equation: well-being = happiness, which sees in men mere animals, content when they can feed and fatten, thus reducing them to a vegetative existence pure and simple.
…could possibly include the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.