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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: "Anal retentive"
In-Reply-To: rmay's message of Tue, 04 Feb 1997 07:10:27 -0800
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Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 20:46:19 GMT
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In article <32F75163.2E6E@ticz.com> rmay <rmay@ticz.com> writes:

>Actually, right-wing and fascist are both pretty vague terms these days, but
>if you use them, they're opposites, not equivalents.  Mussolini and Peron were
>hardly pro-capitalism.

The equation of "right-wing" with "capitalist" is relatively recent, dating
from the late 1960s in the US, when the (traditional sense) right-wing military
and the capitalist industrialists who provided the military with weaponry were
seen as a monolithic "military-industrial complex".

The term "fascist" as a synonym for "right-wing" is a little more slippery,
though certainly older.  Certainly, in the end, the militaristic dictators of
the three Axis powers of World War II shared several characteristics, and the
appellation of "fascist" devolved upon all three regimes.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
