This column is devoted to questions of terminology. I find it very wrong when confusion occurs in the definition of phenomena that have long been studied and described. It is wrong, for example, to call hooligans fascists. A hooligan can become a fascist, but not every hooligan is necessarily a fascist. On the contrary, hooligans are usually against fascists, since fascists love order, and hooligans do not. On this basis, hooligans can certainly call themselves “anti-fascists,” but calling them “fascists” in return is a very big mistake. A hooligan will become a fascist when he “realizes himself,” stops drinking, smoking, takes up sports, and in general becomes “ideological” and beats passersby, guided by scientific recommendations. Until that moment, a hooligan is simply a petty criminal element.
I want to remind you that fascist and in general modernist and pseudo-conservative movements of the first half of the 20th century (that is, communists, fascists, National Socialists) were mass and popular movements in the full sense of the word. These were protest movements. They came out against corruption, oligarchs and plutocrats, international imperialism (a term used by both communists and National Socialists), the dominance of foreign capital, for the rights of workers and a healthy lifestyle.
After their victory, these movements curbed crime, eliminated drug addiction and homosexuality, guaranteed workers’ rights, eliminated unemployment. At least, this is what their reports said. Lawfulness triumphed (Hitler honestly canceled all articles of the constitution guaranteeing civil rights), oligarchs were either destroyed or accepted into the party and placed under party control, industry was nationalized or placed under the control of party organs.
And immediately after their victory, these broad popular movements set about destroying their own and other people’s citizens on an industrial scale.
The killing that the Bolsheviks and National Bolsheviks carried out in their countries, which cost humanity more than 100 million lives, is not the result of “mistakes” or “incorrect theories.” This did not happen because Lenin was a syphilitic, a secret Jew, and an agent of German intelligence, and Hitler, as leftists try to portray him, was a necrophiliac and a latent pederast. This happened precisely because all these people were honest, incorruptible, faithful to their ideals, sincere in their intentions. They did not spare themselves (read at least about Hitler) for the sake of a bright future.
This misfortune befell us and will always befall us because these people achieved their wonderful ideals not in their free time from work, and not with their own money, and not by persuading others of their rightness. No, all of this was done through orders to other people, orders secured by the means taken from these same people, that is, through the use of the state.
The state is a machine of organized violence. Apart from violence, it cannot produce anything. The state cannot, for example, produce a “healthy lifestyle.” It can only forbid what seems unhealthy to it. To support its goals, the state must take resources from people who may have other goals. There is no other way. Therefore, a sincere and incorruptible politician responsible for a healthy lifestyle is capable of achieving only sincere and incorruptible bans and sincere and incorruptible robbery of other sectors in favor of good statistics for his department. That is, the more ambitious the goals of those who seek to control the state machine, the truer they are to their ideals, and the more their eyes burn, the greater the casualties will result. A party with the program “make everyone happy,” if this program is to be implemented at any cost, in the event of its victory will inevitably destroy all of humanity.
And if we are already talking about hooligans, the harm from them does not consist in their being fascists, but in the fact that they bring real fascists after them.