On foaming at the mouth
Sir: I found Brian Crozier's 'Personal column' (8 August) most interesting, the more so as, oddly enough, I had used the same phrase to describe the typical leftist reaction to Franco in the same statesmanlike journal to which he refers. I would say, how- ever, that your columnist lessens the value of his piece by making no attempt to arrive at a definition of fascism and this causes his assertion that Franco is not a fascist to be arbitrary and even eccentric.
The term fascist is, of course, used as a political swear-word to mean anyone that leftist students dislike. But I suggest that it can h- generally agreed that a country run by a fascist regime is always one where democratic rights are denied and, in par- ticular, the right to organise freely in opposi- tion to the regime with a view to replacing it. (It needs little imagination to see that this right in itself includes all the other freedoms of a democratic society.) By this yardstick. it is clear that the Franco regime is, and always has been, fascist. And using the same yardstick, the term must also apply to Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Castro. Nyerere et al ad nauseam. I find that this definition has the advantage of avoiding calling places like the Soviet Union communist when they are clearly nothing of the kind. To save con, fusion, I have adapted the habit of referring to them as red-fascist which makes all clear.
There are of course differences between fascist regimes and some are clearly worse than others. In one important resnect. the Spanish regime is less heinous than the Russian in that the mass of ordinary people can leave and return to Spain more or less without let or hindrance. We all can see that London is simply swarming with Spanish hotel and restaurant workers. By compari- son red-fascist Russia is a prison for 200 million people and only the few favourites of the rulers are allowed out.
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