end up looking like you don't know what you're talking about." I fully appreciate your wish that I and all would only read propaganda history dedicated to the Soviet cause. "to just slap the label 'fascist' on anything and everything is, at best, intellectually lazy, at worst, deliberately deceptive." I'm not getting into a my-definition's-better-than-yours debate, but I will point out that your feelings about what fascism "really means" probably depend on the context in which you first became familiar with the word. I don't know your age (and that's not the only factor), but I'm young enough to have grown up hearing "fascist" as a generic term. In fact, it was quite the surprise to me to learn that political groups had chosen to call themselves fascist, before the penny dropped. If you're more comfortable with the older meaning, I totally understand why it annoys you to hear it genericised and, inevitably, used to describe lesser sins. "Furthermore, the 'horseshoe' thesis so popular with liberal and conservative thinkers is, I think, a rather shameful way for them to distract attention from the fact that, while hundreds of thousands of Communists and socialists risked life and limb trying to prevent fascism gaining state power, liberals and conservatives either ran away scared, turned a blind eye or threw their lot in with the fascists -- very few actively resisted." I'd say it's because they look pretty bloody similar. Or at least the "communism" of Stalin and Mao does next to Hitler.