General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: To The Atlantic, Media and Others Who Get Antifa Twisted [View all]Hortensis
(58,785 posts)muddied by pseudointellectual attempts to link it to past uses. It helps to know a few things to evaluate its various often intensely dishonest uses, most of which are anti-Democratic propaganda. Weaponizing a new term is all.
FIRST: To be liberal is to be anti-fascist.
That's because there is literally no such thing as liberal fascism. (Liberal is personality, not party.)
SECOND: Fascism is almost entirely an ultra-conservative phenomenon, though strong, authoritarian leaders have a fatal appeal for many conservatives, not just the most extreme. (Again, personality, not party.)
THIRD: Fascism by nature is an extremist phenomenon and can also arise among left-wing extremists, who share many characteristics with their counterparts on the far right. However, in far fewer numbers on the left. Nevertheless, when strong authoritarian leaders arise on the left (and also from the right!), some zealots will be drawn from the left. There's just enough truth to scrape up here to build giant lies around.
These guys knew the truth, of course:
MUSSOLINI
"Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State . . . . It is opposed to classical Liberalism . . . . Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. "The Doctrine of Fascism"
HITLER
"Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction." Adolf Hitler
"the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no other beside itself, than by the granting of liberalistic freedom" MEIN KAMPF by Adolf Hitler: Volume 1, Chapter 2
"ANTIFA," 1930s