What ‘fascism’ really means

In 1944, George Orwell complained that the word ‘fascism’ had been rendered meaningless. Eighty years later, and we still have the same problem.

We have all grown accustomed to the hysterical finger-pointing and thundering cries of ‘fascist!’ which appear to dominate today’s discourse. But there is nothing new in the use of ‘fascism’ as a catch-all smear. Even during the Second World War, George Orwell was complaining that the word was subject to multiple definitions. In his column for Tribune o…