It is generally accepted that fascism is a movement of the far-right. This has not stopped rightwing Americans from claiming that fascism is a form of socialism. Although this is a preposterous idea, it does expose common ignorance about the nature of fascism, so that is the subject I now tackle.

Fascism generally has the following features:

Italian fascism had relatively little racist content. Nazism, on the other hand, (German fascism) was not only strongly anti-semitic but built up a set of theories about the inherent racial superiority of Germans, the "superman", advocacy of eugenics, selective-breeding, and involuntary euthanasia, and the "social darwinist" concept of survival of the fittest and neglect of the poor and weak. Spanish fascism, as well as that of many other countries, adopted a degree of anti-semitism, but never imported the Nazi ideology wholesale.