One of the great lies of the modern era is to equate fascism with anything 'right of center', or 'conservative'. This fantastic myth was created by communists during the 1920s and 30s in their struggle for the same political marketplace with national socialists or 'fascists' and the description has entered the media and academia as fact. Yet the opposite is true. Fascism and socialism are twin brethren, espousing 'total' concepts in the utopian and rather bloody desire for a 'new man' and a 'new society'. Conservatism has nothing in common with such ideals.

Today the word 'fascism' is used as a perjorative, to criticise somebody or some policy that the mainstream left-wing population does not like. For most academics or others who don't know what the history of fascism is, the word is joined to express disdain for militarism, ultra-nationalism and corporatism which is the joining together of big business and big government.

While some fascisms might display these tendencies, these are not the essential elements of what constitutes fascism. Remember that the greatest death cults in history, including Islam, have been communal, socialist, or egalitarian states. The reality of fascism is in fact quite different than that put forward by academics, the media, and your typical left-wing voter. Fascism has much in common with modern socialism, and historical marxism.

Fascist creeds are nation-state and culturally specific. Hence the first fascist party – that of Mussolini's fascione – was an Italian national socialist party, with very Italian centric concerns. Likewise Hitler's cult was dedicated to furthering German power, and fascist goverments in Romania and Spain during the inter-war years and beyond, had quite different programs than the fascists implemented in either Germany or Italy. Jews were prominent for example in Italian fascism; the Catholic church was in open alliance with Franco's fascists in Spain; the Nazis had a strong Communist movement; and Romanian fascists had brigades of Christian 'crusaders'.

Not all fascisms are therefore alike and no single definition of fascism can exist. Fascist ideals vary depending on the culture and state in which the fascist movement takes root. But fascism as a general concept is premised on similar ideals held by marxism and communism. Fascism is in reality, the exact opposite of conservatism or what was once called 'orthodox liberalism'; a system of economic, social, foreign policy and moral thinking which held that small government; low taxation; a strong military; and the maintenance of Judeo-Christian and liberal traditions, is what made a society wealthy and relevant. Fascism holds none of these to be true.

In fact fascism, like dialectical marxism, communism, and socialism, is obsessed with destroying the real world, and instituting a utopian order. Fascism has four general and quite consistent goals which make it a brethren ideology to socialism and modern liberal thought.

First, fascism wants to control the means of production and economic wealth. It will do this through nationalisation, co-opting big business, corporatism [indirect control] or a combination of all three.

Second, fascism is concerned with national glory, national greatness, national pride and national renewal, embedded and abetted by state power and the maintenance of that power through one party, or one cult. National power can only be realised through the complete domination of all in society, by the state, for the state, within the state. Hence the word 'totalitarian' first used by Mussolini, when he described fascism as a system where everything exists inside the state and nothing is allowed to exist outside of state.

Third, fascism replaces or joins religion with obedience to a pagan cult, and this cult will reflect the national culture and the national myths, in which the fascist movement resides. Hence in Hitler's Germany Norse legends and myths of Germanic or Aryan perfection were extolled; whilst in Italy Mussolini hearkened back to the glory days of the Roman empire and in Spain Franco enumerated the vast control and superiority enjoyed by earlier Spanish empires. In any event the pagan nature of fascism is evident in symbols, the leadership cult, monumental building, and reflections on mythical past glories real and fantastical.

Fourth, fascism is above all a violent movement of revolution which revolts against the 'liberal-bourgeois' world of capital markets, the boring middle class of modernity, and unheroic nature of constitutionally bound and legally constrained society. Fascism is at its core a socialist revolution of communal optimism, communal sharing, communal effort and communal renewal. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, all echoed Stalin, Lenin, and the French revolution's call for a new man, a new world, and a perfect utopia of 'comrades', 'brothers' and 'citizens'.

There are other aspects of fascism, and communism and marxist-socialism which are also relevant. Propaganda, state education and media control, autarky or the ignorance and distrust of trade and economic gain, the belief in zero sum economics [where one party wins, one loses]; and the idea that economics is subordinate to politics, all inform fascistic ideals. These concepts are obviously not 'conservative', not liberally orthodox, nor do they have anything in common with the great strains of 'right-wing' ideals ranging from libertarianism to economic liberalism.

If one reads the history of fascist regimes and fascist philosophers, one will see quite clearly that socialism and fascism share not only common ideas [state control; state domination; submission to the one party and one state; economic nationalism etc.]; but that the philosophers and thinkers are also similar.

Fascist minds such as Sorel, Herdel, Nietzsche, Rousseau, share much in common with marxist writers such as Gramsci or the Frankfurt school, or even with Derrida and De Man and the 'post-modern' school which has given the modern world the sickness called post-modernism or modern liberalism which is of course nothing more than warmed over cultural marxism and socialism with hints of fascism. Intellectually and practically therefore socialism and fascism are quite close.

Hitler and Mussolini constantly referred to themselves as socialists and revolutionaries, and both were admired by Stalin and regarded by the Soviets in the 1920s and early 1930s as marxist ideologues and reformers.

Hitler's national socialism was an aptly named fascism. The Nazis establish universal health care; generous pensions; mandatory youth leagues; the nationalisation or corporate management of industry; a severing of trade ties [amended in 1939 when the need for oil and raw materials led to the Soviet-Nazi alliance]; a restriction on private property and capital ownership; an unfree media; limiations on free speech and the dismissal of party politics. Such a program has nothing whatsoever to do with 'right wing' or conservative ideas.

The Nazis, Soviets and Italian fascists were of course quite similar. Even the supposed 'socialist' Soviets built an enormous army, and murdered some 30 millions of their 'comrades'. While not as excessively fascist as the Soviets, Mussolini's black-shirts murdered thousands, though they were choir boys compared to the Waffen SS and the brownshirts of Hitler's pre-war days. Simply put the need for violence to create the necessary utopian world, informed both the fasicsts and marxists. Military power is essential to utopian creeds.

It is a signal mark of irrational ignorance that anyone would compare Hitlerism or fascistic movements with conservative, orthodox-liberal ideals. Yet they do. This monstrous lie distorts debate and allows people to ignore the common history shared ideals of fascist and socialist-marxist ideology. Equating the savagery of left-wing ideology which murdered over 100 million people in the past 80 years with a group of ideas which espouse the exact opposite program, reveals a lot about the mentality of today's society.