Nordwave Florida

Political Prisoner Ernst Zundel Released!

‘I’m back out after seven years, three weeks, three prisons and three countries’

To our Zundel friends around the world -

This morning at 2:45 EST, I received a phone call from our British friend, Lady Michele Renouf, who told me:

“We have him in the car! All is well! Here he is…” and I could exchange a few happy words with my husband.

Ernst assured me that his release went smoothly and that he would call me a bit later with additional details.

Half an hour later I received a fax from his lady attorney, Alexandra Rittershaus, who told me:

“Ernst is in freedom. A few people were (at the prison gates), but everything went peacefully. I did not have an opportunity to talk to him, but he looked happy.”

Below is a photo taken just a few minutes ago, showing Ernst with his splendid Austrian defense attorney, Dr. Herbert Schaller who, at the young age of 87, fought like a lion for Ernst’s release!

I will send a more detailed description later in the day, provided there won’t be any Internet censorship or enemy interference, as has happened off and on these past few weeks.

Yours with many Tennessee greetings,

Ingrid Zündel

Ernst with his splendid Austrian defense attorney, Dr. Herbert Schaller

Today, A Brave Man and a Political Prisoner is Set Free for His Thought Crimes

To all –

Here’s what I want to say for now: It’s been twelve hours since I was told that Ernst is free … It’s been raining congratulations and requests for interviews from all around the world!

And here is something that ought to send shivers down our political enemies’ spines – NOT A SINGLE E-MAIL, NOT EVEN ONE ! – has been a negative message!

Ernst Zundel has won big time in the Court of Public Opinion!
Ingrid Zundel
Article Sources: Rense.com & Michael Santomauro

DALLAS – After fighting his way across Europe during World War II, John Pistone was among the U.S. soldiers who entered Adolf Hitler’s home nestled in the Bavarian Alps as the war came to a close.

Making his way through the Berghof, Hitler’s home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, Pistone noticed a table with shelves underneath. Exhilarated by the certainty of victory over the Nazis, Pistone took an album filled with photographs of paintings as a souvenir.

“It was really a great feeling to be there and we knew, by that time, he was on his last leg,” Pistone told The Associated Press.

Sixty-four years after Pistone brought the album home to Ohio, the 87-year-old has learned its full significance: It’s part of a series compiled for Hitler featuring art he wanted for his “Fuhrermuseum,” a planned museum in Linz, Austria, Hitler’s hometown.

Pistone’s album is expected to be formally returned to Germany in a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in January. Germany has 19 other albums discovered at the Berchtesgaden complex that are part of a 31-album collection of works either destined for or being considered for the Linz museum.

Pistone’s 3-inch thick, 12-pound album’s journey from obscurity began this fall when a friend became curious about the book sitting on Pistone’s bookshelf.

The friend discovered after some Internet searching that the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art was involved in 2007 in the restitution of two other albums that were part of a series documenting art stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families.

Its founder, Robert Edsel, who while living in Italy for a time after selling his oil and gas business became interested in what was done to protect art in World War II, traveled to Ohio this fall to examine Pistone’s album. Seeing it convinced him that Pistone had one of the missing albums of the series on the planned museum.

Stamped on the album’s spine is “Gemaldegalerie Linz” — Gemaldegalerie means picture gallery in German — and the Roman numerals for 13. It still has a sticker from the book’s binder in Dresden.

Birgit Schwarz, a German art historian from Vienna who has written books about Hitler and art, including a book called “Hitler’s Museum” describing the albums in the series, is convinced the album is authentic. She said she recognized paintings in the album along with the volume number and title.

“It’s absolutely clear!” she wrote in an enthusiastic e-mail to the AP after reviewing scanned photographs of the album. “Hans Makart’s ‘Pest in Florenz’ (Plague in Florence), for example, the first picture of album XIII, Hitler got as a gift from Mussolini!”

Souvenir hunting was routine by soldiers during the war, and problems arise when people try to sell rather than return culturally important items, said Thomas R. Kline, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in art restitution and works for the foundation.

“It’s really important that as people go through their attics and they find the things that grandpa brought home, people are aware that something as simple as a book of pictures could have a cultural significance,” Kline said.

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http://www.enationalist.com/solargeneral/

Largest pro-white media on the planet!

Here are some of my favorite quotes on the right to bear arms. If you like these, surf over to my fortunes collection where you can download them in a couple of cookie files.

When only cops have guns, it’s called a “police state”.

Love your country, but never trust its government.

– Robert A. Heinlein.

“The power to tax involves the power to destroy;…the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create….”

– Chief Justice John Marshall, 1819.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.”

– Thomas Jefferson

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government”

– Thomas Jefferson, 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334

“The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference – they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good”

– George Washington

“The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.”

– Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

– Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficient… The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

– Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.”

– Barry Goldwater

“I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787

The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings.

– Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun, August 1588

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.”

– Abraham Lincoln, 4 April 1861

“One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms.”

– Constitutional scholar Joseph Story, 1840

“The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being…”

– J.G.A. Pocock, describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S.

Men trained in arms from their infancy, and animated by the love of liberty, will afford neither a cheap or easy conquest.

– From the Declaration of the Continental Congress, July 1775.

“As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives [only] moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion to your walks.”

– Thomas Jefferson, writing to his teenaged nephew.

No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.

– 16 Am. Jur. Sec. 177 late 2d, Sec 256

“The state calls its own violence `law’, but that of the individual `crime’”

– Max Stirner

“Taking my gun away because I might shoot someone is like cutting my tongue out because I might yell `Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”

– Peter Venetoklis

…Virtually never are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.”

– Don B. Kates, writing on statistical patterns in gun crime

“Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.”

– John F. Kennedy

The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”

– Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story of the John Marshall Court

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

– George Washington, in a speech of January 7, 1790

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves … and include all men capable of bearing arms.”

– Senator Richard Henry Lee, 1788, on “militia” in the 2nd Amendment

“…quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.” [...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.]

– (Lucius Annaeus) Seneca “the Younger” (ca. 4 BC-65 AD),

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

– Cesare Beccaria, as quoted by Thomas Jefferson’s Commonplace book

No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.

– “Political Disquisitions”, a British republican tract of 1774-1775

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.

– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787

& what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that his people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”

– Patrick Henry, speech of June 5 1788

Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the *real* object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?

– Patrick Henry, speech of June 9 1788

“To disarm the people… was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

– George Mason, speech of June 14, 1788

“The great object is, that every man be armed. [...] Every one who is able may have a gun.”

– Patrick Henry, speech of June 14 1788

Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.

– “M.T. Cicero”, in a newspaper letter of 1788 touching the “militia” referred to in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms…

– Samuel Adams, in “Phila. Independent Gazetteer”, August 20, 1789

The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens, is only to the *government*, not to *society*; and as long as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage.

– Joel Barlow, “Advice to the Privileged Orders”, 1792-93

[The disarming of citizens] has a double effect, it palsies the hand and brutalizes the mind: a habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral [force]; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.

– Joel Barlow, “Advice to the Privileged Orders”, 1792-93

A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

– John Stuart Mill, writing on the U.S. Civil War in 1862

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.

– Attributed to Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)

Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’

– Mao Tse-tung, 1938, inadvertently endorsing the Second Amendment.

In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ’shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. [...] The Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.

– Majority Supreme Court opinion in “U.S. vs. Miller” (1939)

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

– Robert A. Heinlein, “Beyond This Horizon”, 1942

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.

– Hitler, April 11 1942

The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.

– A.E. Van Vogt, “The Weapon Shops Of Isher”, ASF December 1942

Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

– George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb”, 1945

Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.

– Hubert H. Humphrey, 1960

No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction. Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this weapon in crime than ever before.

– Colin Greenwood, in the study “Firearms Control”, 1972

Let us hope our weapons are never needed –but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government — and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.”

– Edward Abbey, “Abbey’s Road”, 1979

If I were to select a jack-booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms].

– U.S. Representative John Dingell, 1980

.. a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen…

– Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App.181)

The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.

– Report of the Subcommittee On The Constitution of the Committee On The Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, second session (February, 1982), SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5

In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the “collective” right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.

– Stephen P. Halbrook, “That Every Man Be Armed”, 1984

To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you’re putting a money test on getting a gun. It’s racism in its worst form.

– Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 1988

I don’t like the idea that the police department seems bent on kepping a pool of unarmed victims available for the predations of the criminal class.

– David Mohler, 1989, on being denied a carry permit in NYC

Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don’t have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.

– Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the LA Times 15 Oct 1992

You know why there’s a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.

– Rush Limbaugh, in a moment of unaccustomed profundity 17 Aug 1993

The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals… It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.

– Albert Gallatin, Oct 7 1789

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

– John F. Kennedy

http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/quotes.html

The continent of our forebears releases yet another amazing secret.

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

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A Russian billionaire has shelled out several million dollars to join the league of folks who own memorabilia related to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Duesseldorf-based vintage car dealer Michael Froehlich and asked him to track down Hitler’s dark-blue 770 K model Mercedes Benz. After weeks of searching, the dealer learned that Adolf Hitler’s original Mercedes was in Austria at the end of World War II, was later moved to the Classic Car Museum in Las Vegas, and then ended up in the hands of a Bavarian beer magnate in Germany.
The Russian buyer arrived in Germany on a private jet to seal the deal and bought it from the private owner for between 6 and 15 million dollars.

Hitler’s car now resides in Moscow, a place the Nazi dictator was never able to visit, despite the efforts of his troops. More

AACHEN, Germany — A man accused of murdering Dutch civilians as a member of a Waffen SS hit squad said at his trial Friday that he was proud about being chosen as a volunteer to fight for the Nazis.

Heinrich Boere, 88, made his first comments to the Aachen state court since his trial opened at the end of October. As part of that SS unit, he is charged with killing a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted.

Boere said he remembered his mother waking him up the night in 1940 that Germany invaded his hometown in the Netherlands and seeing Stuka dive-bombers overhead. Instead of fearing the German bombs, Boere, whose father was Dutch and mother German, said his family was elated as the attack unfolded.

“(My mother) said ‘they’re coming’ now things will be better,” he told the court, speaking animatedly to the panel of judges.
“It was better,” he added later.

Boere was born in Eschweiler, Germany, on the outskirts of Aachen where he lives today, but moved to the Netherlands when he was an infant.

After the Germans had overrun his hometown of Maastricht and the rest of the Netherlands, he remembers as an 18-year-old seeing a recruiting poster for the Waffen SS, signed by Heinrich Himmler. It offered German citizenship after two years of service and the possibility of becoming a policeman after that.

He showed up with 100 other Dutchmen at the recruitment office and was one of 15 chosen.

“I was very proud,” Boere told the court in a statement read by his attorney before he answered questions from the presiding judge.

After fighting on the Russian front, Boere ended up back in the Netherlands as part of “Silbertanne” — a unit of largely of Dutch SS volunteers responsible for reprisal killings of their countrymen for resistance attacks on collaborators.

Boere admitted the three killings to Dutch authorities when he was in captivity after the war but managed to escape from his POW camp and eventually return to Germany.

He was sentenced to death in the Netherlands in 1949 — later commuted to life imprisonment — but Boere has managed to avoid jail so far.

Still, Boere told the court he was aware of the possibility he would be pursued by authorities, so much so that he never married.

“I always had to consider that my past might catch up with me, and I didn’t want to inflict that upon a woman,” he said in his statement.

Boere refused to comment on his time with Silbertanne, but his attorneys said he would address that period when the trial resumes Dec. 2.

General Thanksgiving By the PRESIDENT of the United States Of America

A PROCLAMATION

WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANKSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”

NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;– for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish Constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted;– for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we
have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;– and, in general, for all the great and various favours which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also, that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions;– to enable us all, whether in publick or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us); and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

GIVEN under my hand, at the city of New-York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

(signed) G. Washington

When “Swastika” was shown at the 1973 Cannes film festival, fights broke out and somebody threw part of a chair at the screen.“All hell broke loose,” says the film’s Australian-born, Los Angeles-based director Phillipe Mora. “There were eruptions all through the theatre. Finally they stopped the film and a French guy came out, looking like a head waiter and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Cannes film festival, not a beer hall.” The cause of the ruckus was, primarily, that the film appeared to humanise Adolf Hitler and his inner circle. Never-seen-before colour footage, shot mostly by Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun, showed the personification of evil cuddling his dog, playing with children and discussing “Gone with the Wind.” The revival of “Swastika,” championed by the German documentary director Ilona Ziok, is a sign, Mora says, that Germany has matured in how it handles its Nazi legacy. After the Berlin screening, a German film producer effusively told Mora, a Jew whose father was born in Leipzig, that “Swastika” should be shown in every school. It’s a far cry from its reception in 1973. Three decades before films such as “Downfall” began breaking the taboo against exploring the human side of the Nazis, Mora’s film provoked outrage. “The film was made under the assumption that everybody knew Hitler was a monster and a murderer. I didn’t realise it was open to debate,” he says. “But he was a man with a mother and a father and sisters and a pet dog. And that viscerally disturbed people. They had only seen Hitler ranting and raving in grainy black and white film. It took 30 years but now a new generation is interested.” Lost at the Pentagon Mora went to the Pentagon, which found the eight cans of film and happily handed them over.  “We were just dumbfounded,” he recalls. “Here was this incredible footage that’d just been sitting there because no one had asked for it.”More > > >

The stated ideology of the Italian fascists and the German Nazis often did not marry up completely with the political policies they pursued.“Fascist” and “fascism” are terms that one might suppose to be simple badges, but dig beneath the surface and there are myriad complexities and a morass of academic debate.

It is more than six decades since the end of World War II and the fall of Nazi Germany, but those events are the prism through which the word “fascism” is still viewed.

The first “fascist” movement to gain power was Mussolini’s Blackshirts in Italy in 1922. Their movement could certainly be said to be nationalist and authoritarian, as well as accepting of violence in the struggle for political power, but much of the rest of its characteristics have been subject to academic dispute.

[snip]

But the clearest problem in the definition of the word “fascist” is the very wideness of its application over the years. There is a plethora of uses from Rick in the Young Ones deploying it as an insult, to the Oxford English Dictionary’s differing definitions “(loosely) a person of right-wing authoritarian views” and “a person who advocates a particular viewpoint or practice in a manner perceived as intolerant or authoritarian”. So you have “body fascism”.

Broadly speaking, in political discourse, it is a “boo word”, a term used more for purposes of condemnation than precise categorisation. The Nazis were bad, and in this view their ideology was fundamentally linked to fascism, meaning that fascism is fundamentally bad.

“It is a useful political weapon to say a modern political movement is like fascism,” says Mr Passmore.

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