...but somehow, it always seems to land in Europe. And this comment is one that I've always thought rung true:

Re: the misuse in current parlance of "fascism". It is, of course, not Nazism. Fascism was an Italian phenomenon. I believe that the Left has sought to supplant "Nazi" with "fascist" because of the root words for Nazism: National Socialism. Since Stalin et al. practiced International Socialism, one can understand their sensitivity. National Socialism and International Socialism are not opposite ends of some political spectrum: they are subsets of Socialism. And when one counts up the dead, the distinction [between] National and International Socialism is one without a difference.

Socialism in the UK? Immigration Officers dressing like fascists? Naaaaaahhhh! Next you will say there are gay people in Iran...

Miscellanea:

Around the time of WW2, I believe the popular term was "Hitlerism", for the Nazis. This is fair enough, as Hitler's personal agenda-setting wasn't quite the same as the National Socialist platform, and the early National Socialists who weren't Hitlerists got rather nastily purged (in some cases, to death).

Amusingly, the Communist Party in Russia referred to itself as a "Social Democratic" party before the Great War and the Revolution. Even more amusingly, this was not remarkable at the time; it's only more recently that "Social Democrat" hasn't meant "Revolutionary Marxist".

A lot of tyrannical dictatorships call themselves "democratic republics". Are you against democracy and freedom from monarchs as well?

What matters is how organizations act, not what they label themselves.

Fascism, Nazism and communism are all just different implementations of authoritarian collectivism. They differ in what combination of race, nationality and class they use to define the collective, but they use the same methods because they have the same fundamental objectives.

All seek to use the power of the state to eliminate individuality, forcing every citizen to become a living tool animated by the leader's will. As such, they are really just attempts to recreate the power of absolute monarchy in societies that will no longer accept tradition or God's will as a justification for it.

Mussolini was himself a Communist, and developed Fascism expressly as a "right deviation" when he saw that Communism was economically nonviable. He left in a few incentives to generate productivity, but the overall package wasn't much different.

There was an update of Ambrose Pierce's "Devil's Dictionary" some time ago that stated the only difference between socialism and fascism was that fascists had snappier uniforms. Too true.