re: #228 Charles
I guess that it’s possible to argue about these definitions (fascism, socialism) for a long time. Talking of practice: if you look at the history of the Soviet Union, you find that the wealth of the great “socialist republic” was concentrated in the hands of a very few people indeed - mostly party bosses, nomenklatura and military/industrial elite. And the erasing of class distinctions in Russia and Ukraine during the 1920s and 30s involved a large-scale imprisonment and massacre of civilians that didn’t differ very much in its final results from the racial “solutions” later practiced by the Nazis. There’s not much doubt that at least some of the practices of Nazism were learned from those of Bolshevism and, later, Stalinism.

I would still contend that modern fascism - in its contemporary national socialist (“red-brown”) form - is a hybrid born of left wing and right wing political tendencies. It can be clearly seen in Russia today, where it is one of the prevailing ideologies.