Fascism
- Any popular political movement that begins with street violence.
- A system where government and business collude at the highest levels, essentially rendering business into a controlled subsidiary of government, especially where government is an outright dictatorship.
- (Orwell's definition) "Anything I don't like."
The term "fascism" is derived from the Latin "fasces". The fasces, in ancient Rome, was the badge of a magistrate's office, borne on ceremonial occasions by a kind of deputy called a "lictor". The fasces consisted of a bundle of straight rods with an axe in the center, with the blade of the axe extending beyond the bundle:
The original Fascists started in Italy and used the fasces as their symbol. This symbolism, derived from ancient Rome, may have been primal to the Italians who started the "original" Fascist Movement. It's not easy to know whether the physical symbolism of the fasces, as construed here, was a factor in its initial popularity. Perfectly likely, it wasn't.
But to an observer from a later time, the fasces is the perfect physical symbol to define fascism. Picture industry, the schools, religion, the family, the popular media, and the state as being all bound together as a bundle of rods, each subject to the direction of the axe head. The protruding axe head is the dictator. That's the real meaning of fascism: all the institutions of society, nominally independent, actually bound to the will of a central power which happens to be human.
