Posted 01 October 2006 - 02:30 AM
Fascism is defined as a state run by a single dictator and enforced by a coalition of the military, paramilitary organizations, and an alliance of the corporate elements of a nation. All of these can be seen in the fascist regimes that gripped Germany, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Spain, and Japan during the 1930s and 40s, the height of fascist power. Every fascist regime is forced to play on the national pride of the people, telling them that they are superior to others. National socialism, found only exclusively in Germany in that period in Hitler's Third Reich, was the only doctrine which explicitly went beyond that point, to a system of organized racial hatred and eventually racial extermination. Nationalism and theories of ethnic superiority still remain in the realm of standard fascism, but hatred directed against other ethnic groups makes you a Nazi.
There are other varying definitions, but this is the one I've devised and have used almost exclusively. A fascist state is not so much different from a Stalinist state, mainly due to the erroneous direct comparison of the SS to the NKVD, and the Gulags to concentration camps. Germany possessed a paramilitary and later a military organization devoted to Hitler in the Schutzstaffel, and set up a system of camps as planned nearly exclusively by Reinhard Heydrich and Himmler, while Soviet Russia maintained a secret police dedicated not to one individual, but to the party, and a system of improvised labor/prison camps, as used by most belligerents. Additionally, Germany relied on a union of the corporatists, a devotion of noted industrialists like the Krupp family, the leaders of the chemical cartel IG Farben AG, and the support of even more noted individuals and corporations in Willy Messerschmitt's Messerschmitt AG, Blohm and Voss, Ferdinand Porsche, and Rheinmetall. Stalin's Soviet Union had no corporations, all means of production were actually owned by the state, and the only thing you could consider to be semi-autonomous groups would be design bureaus and factory boards for certain regions. Soviet Russia never resorted to racism either, instead, as described by Paul Robeson, remaining a segregation free country, while the United States was still ruled by the Jim Crow laws and the Seperate but Equal Supreme Court decisions. If anything, the only times Russia has ever gotten close to fascism have been now, and in August 1914 after the German declaration of war.