WAGNER: Fascist pancakes will make you sick

Back in July, during a K-Days pancake breakfast, a far-left protester screamed at Premier Danielle Smith, “You’re a f****** fascist!” and “f*** your fascist pancakes!”Who even knew there was such a thing as “fascist pancakes?”For decades, leftists have slandered conservatives with the epithet “fascist.” Obviously, the intent is to smear conservatives with a term of derision that is justly viewed as evil.But the leftists who use the term “fascist” don’t even know what it means. Historically, fascism is a political movement that embraces a hardcore form of socialism. Thus, when a far-left activist accuses Danielle Smith of being a fascist, it’s actually likely that the activist herself could more properly be classified as a fascist.In 2007, Jonah Goldberg, a contributing editor for the well-known conservative magazine National Review, wrote an in-depth analysis of the real history and meaning of fascism entitled Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is essentially the founder of fascism. He was a long-time socialist theorist and writer. During the early 1900s, before he achieved power, Mussolini’s writing was admired by Vladimir Lenin, who would later become the brutal communist dictator of Russia.Mussolini remained a member of the Italian Socialist Party until the outbreak of World War I. At the time, pure socialist doctrine required opposition to the war. From the socialist perspective, the workers of all the European countries should be united against the bourgeoisie. As Goldberg puts it, the socialist view was “that class was more important than race, nationality, religion, language, culture, or any other ‘opiate’ of the masses.”.Mussolini, however, declared himself in favour of Italy’s role in the war. He was thus expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for his “heresy.” But he declared, “I am and shall remain a socialist, and my convictions will never change!”The war divided European socialists between those who took a new direction by declaring their loyalty to their country (i.e., nationalists), and the traditional socialists whose only loyalty was to class conflict.As Goldberg writes, traditional socialism “was really just a kind of socialism: international socialism. Mussolini was interested in creating a new socialism, a socialism in one state, a national socialism, which had the added benefit of being achievable.”This is a key point. Fascists — or national socialists — were only interested in socialism in their own country, for their own countrymen, not for people everywhere. Traditional socialists and communists wanted socialism for everyone without exception — essentially a one-world socialist state.Or to put this in conservative terms, the goal of fascism is to establish tyranny in one particular country, whereas the goal of other forms of socialism and communism is to establish tyranny right around the world.Two basic factors led to fascism being called “right-wing” despite its inescapable socialism. For one, fascism embraced nationalism, and in some contexts, nationalism can be considered right-wing. The other basic factor, as Goldberg notes, is that from “the beginning, fascism was dubbed as right-wing not because it necessarily was right-wing but because the communist left thought this was the best way to punish apostasy.”In other words, the Italian Socialists were extremely angry with Mussolini for breaking with them over the war, and they wanted to punish his “apostasy” by smearing him with the label “right-wing.”.In Germany, Adolf Hitler became the leader of that country’s fascist party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It had the word “socialist” in the name because it was a socialist party. This cannot be explained away.Goldberg quotes 1920s Nazi ideologist Gregor Strasser describing the party’s ideology this way: “We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!”Although there were some doctrinal differences, the fundamental conflict between National Socialism and communism wasn’t over economics. The conflict was over the issue of nationalism. “Marx’s most offending conviction to Hitler was the idea that the ‘workingmen have no country.’”Besides the common embrace of socialist economics, National Socialism and today’s far-left share a pagan view of sexuality. As Goldberg explains, “Nazi attitudes toward sexuality were grounded in unremitting hostility to Christianity and Judaism, both of which rejected the pagan view of sex as gratification, imbuing it instead with deep moral significance.”But in contrast to fascism, Nazism, and other forms of socialism, North American conservatism advocates for private property, free enterprise economics, individual liberty, and traditional morality. This is why it’s so ironic when, as Goldberg notes, “champions of liberty get called fascists by champions of statism.”If you want to try some fascist pancakes, you probably won’t get any from Danielle Smith. However, there are other political figures in Alberta who are more likely to have some available. But if their cooking is as bad as their policies, you’ll probably get sick.

WAGNER: Fascist pancakes will make you sick

Related Stories

Kenney sparks backlash after calling Red Ensign remigration video ‘fascist fantasy’

HANNAFORD: How ‘fascist pancakes’ sabotaged ‘live and let live’ — the radical tactics poisoning discourse

Former Epstein pimp found dead in Paris home

Federal and provincial NDP members mock Smith with 'fascist pancakes' jokes