Fascist or Communist?

My biggest pet peeve when talking politics is people using the words "Fascist" and "Communist." The only time it is appropriate to do this is when the people you talk about self-identify as what you are calling them. This is an important distinction to make because since the term "fascist" was coined by Mussolini there have been actual real self-identified fascists. Right now there are Neo Nazis fighting for the independence of Ukraine from Russia, and Russia itself has Neo Nazis. These Neo Nazis IDENTIFY AS FASCISTS, and they love themselves some Hitler and swastikas, and they have well known established counterparts in the Americas.

It is an abuse of the English language to run around calling every government you personally feel is less than ideal "fascist" or "communist." It's fully possible to be a dictator while not being a fascist or a communist. There is no such thing as secret fascism or secret communism where someone is secretly a fascist or communist but does not reveal this to his political allies, any more than there are secret conservatives or secret progressives or secret anarchists or secret libertarians; political ideology is inherently public.

If someone does not identify as fasciast or communist, it is impossible that you somehow know so much more about fascism or communism than they do to determine they are mistaken about their own political ideology. Instead you are using the word "fascist" or "communist" for political ideologies you don't like. Compared to the actual real self-identified fascists and communists, you are very far off on how you are using these words.

George W. Bush's monkey-see-monkey-do retarded-cowboy Amscamming antics earned him a place as my least favorite president of all time. The W was certainly popular with self identified fascists in the USA. Supposedly his grandfather was something of a fascist himself. But was the W a fascist? His father who led the CIA for a while before becoming president himself was certainly not fascist as he happily stepped down from power when he lost re-election to Bill Clinton. The W by all reports was a red-blooded American and did not harbor any secret love for fascism, and happily surrendered the white house to Obama.

Trump (who did far less violence and wasted far less money than the W did) was closer to fitting the description of fascist. Trump sympathized with a small fraction of his supporters who were self-identified fascists and he even tried to overturn the the results of his failed re-election. However representing the people who voted for you and being a wannabe dictator does not make you a fascist if you don't consider yourself a fascist; Trump has made his Putin-loyalist political alliances perfectly clear, and Putin is many things but a fascist he is not.

The most "communist" president we have had in recent history is Barack Obama, and his critics love to call him a commie. This is because he passed regulation around a failing health care system. However government regulation of industry is a normal government practice regardless of what form of government you have, and thus can not be said to be explicitly communist. Near Florida, Cuba is self-proclaimed communist, with all the dystopian garnish that entails. Obama's politics did not resemble Castro's in any meaningful way.

Bernie Sanders is openly socialist, and supports a number of policies that one could argue are not compatible with healthy capitalism, but is he a communist? In Bernie's wildest wet dreams, if he got everything he wanted, he would still end up less communist than Putin, and even further less communist than Cuba, to the point where Sanders can not really be considered a communist at all, but more like a northern European capitalist, or in other words what Sanders himself calls a "democratic socialist."  If you think that is the same thing as a communist, then you are ignorantly claiming Cuba and Northern  Europe have the same system of governance.

People who use "communist" and "fascist" as pejoratives consider themselves wise students of history while being willfully blind to ideologies other than their own. Next time you go to use the word communist or fascist ask yourself "does the person I am applying this to consider themselves to be what I am about to call them?" If not, keep your childish name calling to yourself.