Do We Really Understand Fascism?

One of the reasons that I am reluctant to jump on the ‘Trump is a Fascist’ bandwagon is that I know enough history about the so-called Western ‘democracies’ to believe that we can put Trump in a category which fits a lot of other Western political leaders as well.

Because if you compare Trump only to Hitler and Mussolini, you’re leaving a lot of other political leaders out of the picture whose behaviors and strategies should place them on the Fascist best-seller list as well.

In 1940, after the fall of France and the installation in France of a pro-Fascist regime under German control, Hitler had to make a decision about whether or not to attack the last Western enemy of the Third Reich which was England, and thus secure total Nazi domination of the Western European continent, having already subdued Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries and France.

The problem with invading England, however, was that Germany didn’t have a large enough naval contingent to ferry enough troops across the Channel to mount a landed attack. So, Hitler decided to focus his military assault on England with continuous bombing both of industrial targets as well as civilian sites.

In planning what would eventually be known as the Battle of Britain which Germany ultimately lost because Hitler and his generals underestimated the number…