Salamantis: “Those on the right wish to dissociate themselves from Nazis and Fascists for the same reason that many Christians wish to disown those Christians who collaborated with the Third Reich, and more recently, Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian in Idaho - because they find them to be repugnant and the very association to be distressingly indicting of their own ideologies.”

You have it exactly backwards. It is the liberals who are trying to distance themselves from their distant cousins, the Nazis and Fascists. The National Socialists were socialists. Calling themselves Socialists wasn’t some trick to hide a right wing character. What you saw was what you got: Socialism.

Mussolini started out as a socialist in Switzerland, where he had fled to avoid the draft. He joined the Marxian Socialist movement. Later, he worked for the local socialist party in Trento and edited its newspaper L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (“The Future of the Worker”). Mussolini became one of the leading socialists in Italy. After Mussolini created the Fascists and was their leader, he made a speech saying that he was a socialist, had always been a socialist, and would always be a socialist.

Now, it seems like if the leader of the Fascists calls himself a socialist, that might be a clue that the Fascists were socialists. However, maybe in the eyes of American liberals Mussolini was just a really cunning conservative who called himself a socialist to dissociate himself from the right wing and hide his secret conservative leanings, eh?