Comedian Rob Schneider uses F-word to describe America.

[fractional slacker]

Rob tells the truth and calls America a fascist state. Whoa! Probably not a conincidence his career is not doing well, but he is risking future work by saying the truth. Guy has to get some credit for that, yes? 

Let's start the stop watch until the thought police come out with their usual racist, homophobe, bigot tub of slander.

 

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/05/02/rob-schneider-tells-chris-stigall-we-are-sliding-very-fast-towards-fascism/

[tiepolo]

'Fascist' is one of those loaded terms which people are seldom willing to define, and therefore the people who use such a word are people I am seldom inclined to listen to. The only certainty is that if something is called 'fascist' it is very very bad and wicked in some dark and terrible way. Everyone seems to want to emotionally masturbate by imagining that they are making a stand against 'fascists'. The word may as well be substituted with 'demons' and 'demonic', for all the light it sheds on anything.

[dsayers]

'Fascist' is one of those loaded terms which people are seldom willing to define

 

Which people? I can define it if you'd like. It's a system where costs are subsidized and profits are privatized. It's evil because it's coercive.

[JamesP]

Some people use it as an emotionally loaded pejorative when the police are doing something they don't like.

 

By the definition dsayers provided, the USA has become increasingly fascist over my lifetime, if not three times that long.

[Wuzzums]

I would argue that regardless of definition, the US is either a fascistic state already or the closest thing to it. Here's a fun game, try to check off all the traits you see in the US from all these lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

[nathanm]

Fascism is like the horizon, it's something people have heard and read about, they can see it themselves, but it's always off in the distance and you never reach it. If events don't unfold exactly like George Orwell wrote well then hey, I guess things are bad, but they're not THAT bad.  Whew!  Let's not worry or do anything about it until we see actual swastikas on flags, OK?

[Wesley]

If only evil was so blatant and obvious...

[nathanm]

But it IS blatant and obvious.  The news stories of cop abuse boggle the mind, for instance.  They are getting away with slaughtering everyday people.  Not creepy-looking villains and thugs, but average everyday folks.  People actually still vote for the scummiest and most corrupt people we can muster.  By the time the West gets to a North Korea level of visually-obvious fascist pagentry the minds of people will have already been broken and it will no longer matter.

[Wesley]

But it IS blatant and obvious.  The news stories of cop abuse boggle the mind, for instance.  They are getting away with slaughtering everyday people.  Not creepy-looking villains and thugs, but average everyday folks.  People actually still vote for the scummiest and most corrupt people we can muster.  By the time the West gets to a North Korea level of visually-obvious fascist pagentry the minds of people will have already been broken and it will no longer matter.

By that, I meant that they don't say they are evil or fly swastika flags and such.

 

They do evil things and say they are the good guys.

[tiepolo]

Which people? I can define it if you'd like. It's a system where costs are subsidized and profits are privatized. It's evil because it's coercive.

That's fair enough as your definition. I believe George Bernard Shaw called both Britain and America 'fascist' in the 1940s, by essentially that definition. But most would only class Germany and Italy and possibly Spain as the only fascist nations, by the commion historical understanding.

 

Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto didn't say anything about privatizing profits. Social and economic policies of fascism seemed rather similar to those of Communism, actually, including nationalization of industries, and the introduction of a progressive income tax.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto

 

Notice the Facist manifesto also included the then radical notion of votes for women! And a minimum wage! It all seems very 'progressive' and Left-wing, in actuality, which belies the prevailing understanding. The only difference between Italian fascism and Communism is that Italian fascism recognised national ties and rejected international class struggle.

 

Nowerdays 'Antifa' radicals, meanwhile, use the term 'fascist' against any vaguely conservative, nationalistic or patriotic group. That shows how silly this is! UKIP often get smeared as 'fascist', even though they are classical liberals and advocates of the free market. (When the National Union of Students says 'no platform for those promoting fascism', they are not talking about people defending the bank bail-outs!)

 

Nazi Germany had more socialistic economic principles. Hitler said in 1927, concerning the Nazi party: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”

 

Earlier, his work Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed much concern for the conditions of poor German workers, and disgust with the economic institutions that kept them in a debased state. Again, no evidence of wanting to subsidise profits and privatise costs! The Nazis do not meet the aforementioned definition of 'fascist'.

 

Nazi Germany is the regime with which flingers of the term 'fascist' generally seek to smear those on the receiving end by association (even if there is no association and little ideological common ground). The term is also used to besmirch white nationalists and race-realists whatever economic policies they might favour, and however opposed they might be to subsidizing costs and privatising profits. So it seems 'fascist' is a word without any practical application, since there is inevitably more passion than understanding when the word is used.

[vze57564]

America is primed to be fascist.  For now we have socialism, but when that drops hey will turn it fascist.