US President Donald Trump and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico at the CPAC conference in the United States last week. (source: TASR)
How far we have come.
Just three years ago Slovakia’s present leaders, then in opposition, stood before a May Day crowd in Nitra and accused then-President Zuzana Čaputová – Slovakia’s first and only female head of state – of being an “American whore” subservient to US interests, and railed against “fascism” in Ukraine.
Slovakia’s neighbour had been invaded just weeks earlier, and the blood of massacred Ukrainian civilians was barely dry on the streets of Bucha and Irpin – but the speakers weren’t referring to the Russian perpetrators.
This month self-described “social democrat” Robert Fico – now prime minister – left Slovakia (in the middle of government crisis) in order to travel across the Atlantic to speak at CPAC, America’s premier gathering of far-right politicians and conspiracy theorists – including some actual fascists – and to kowtow to the richest and most powerful man in America.
“Actual fascists”, you ask? Weren’t those just “Roman salutes”?
Absurdly, the debate about who is a fascist and what constitutes fascism has been reduced to a grotesque purity test that hinges on the angle of one’s arm when Sieg-Heiling or whether one must first murder enough people in order to qualify.
Meanwhile, right-wing politicians gleefully misuse the term without a murmur of criticism. To choose from a litany of examples, Donald Trump repeatedly and ludicrously described Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris as “Marxist, communist, fascist and socialist”.
The Russian regime routinely describes Ukraine as “fascist” – at the same time as it murders and terrorises civilians, engages in wars of territorial aggrandisement and ethnically cleanses areas it occupies. Shamefully, Fico and his acolytes echo Russia’s rhetoric.
The academic debate will never end; as far back as 1944, George Orwell despaired that the term had lost all meaning.
