For John, BLUF: I am going to blame high school history teachiing for the false belief that Donald Trump is a Fascist. Nothing to see here; just move along.
My Middle Brother, who is a Progressive, sent me this article
Here is the sub-headline:
Since Gen. Mark Milley was quoted as saying Donald Trump is “fascist to the core,” a term avoided by top members of the Democratic Party is suddenly everywhere.
From The Old Gray Lady, by Jonathan Weisman, 17 October 2024.
Here is the lede plus six:
The word “fascist” has hovered around former President Donald J. Trump from the moment he rode down his golden escalator in 2015 to warn of Mexican rapists and drug dealers in the memorable opening of his bid for president. But for most top Democrats, it was a provocative term loaded with dread, historical import and potential incitement — best left unsaid.
Until Vice President Kamala Harris this week made clear — again and again — that it would be just fine with her to use the word.
On Tuesday, as the radio host Charlamagne Tha God interviewed Ms. Harris, he interjected as the vice president contrasted her vision with her rival’s. “The other is about fascism,” he said of Mr. Trump’s vision. “Why can’t we just say it?”
Ms. Harris’s response: “Yes, we can say that.”
On Wednesday, speaking in Washington Crossing, Pa., Ms. Harris quoted Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, describing his former boss as “fascist to the core,” as detailed in a new book from the journalist Bob Woodward.
“America,” she said, “must heed this warning.”
The quotation of Mr. Milley may have opened the floodgates for Democrats, granting new permission with the authority of his uniform and his unique closeness to the inner workings of Mr. Trump’s administration. But an element of political risk remains, even as Mr. Trump freely uses the word himself against Ms. Harris.
As an aside, one wonders if General Milley is sort of a Paronist.
But, since we are crediting General Milley with opening up the use of the word fascist, via Reporter Bob Woodward's book, War, we need to ask what it means. I expect that to most Americans the term fascist conjurs up the image of German Fuehrer Adoph Hitler. I think that is wrong. Fascist comes from Italian leader Benito Musolinni, Il Duce. He was a former Communist, looking for a new system. This was parallel to Adolph Hitler creating a new approach for Germany, National Socialism. While Wikipedia says "Nazism is a form of fascism", I am doubtful that Adolph Hitler was modeling his party on what was happening in Italy at the same time. I doubt that Hitler saw Musolinni as an influencer.
It would seem that those who followed in the fascist path are Spain (Francisco Franco) and Portugal (António de Oliveira Salazar).
Yes, Benito Musolinni was a bad guy, but he was no Hitler. Remember that Carlo Levi, a Jewish Italian Physician and Painter, lived through the war to write Christ Stopped at Eboli. We know that Anne Frank, a Jewish teen in German occupied Holland, did not live to edit her diaries.
So, does General Milley think that Trump models himself after Musollini or after Hitler?
Yet, there are others in the Twentieth Century who might have been worse than Hitler. I am thinking of Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union), Mao Zedung (China), Pol Pot (Cambodia) and the Kim Family (North Korea). Each has been ruthless and each has killed a higher percentage of its Citizens. And yet we tend to shy away from examining the evil in those four leaders and from using them as standards of evil by comparison. A prime example is Reporter Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for The New York Times on the Soviet Union and the Holodomor.
In fact, it appears sometimes that Progresssives make space for such evil. I remember, about a decade or so ago, sitting in the parking lot of the Raytheon Facility in Sudbury, Massachusetts and listening to a woman on NPR talking about Mao's Great Leap Forward, "That to make an omlet you had to break some eggs." wikipedia has a low estimate of 15 million dead, with a high of 55 million. Elsewhere I have heard the number 100 milliion dead.
When someone claims Candidate Donald Trump is a fascist it tells me more about the speaker than it does about Donald J Trump.
Regards — Cliff
