State is Right

The term fascist or fascism is nearly meaningless to most Americans. Indeed, it was pretty meaningless to me. It's a term associated with Nazi Germany, but to be honest, could be applied to other countries. Given this word gives people so much confusion, why do we still use it?

Fascism is, essentially, supremacy of the state. The government is in charge and it's all important. Citizens must give up rights for the betterment of the government. Implicit in this philosophy is that the government, full of power, is likely to abuse this power, making its people miserable, while the leaders make all the important decisions.

If state is all powerful, then religion would be less important (unless, I suppose, it's a religious state), because religion would be a competitor to the state.

As I describe this, I realized that many communist countries would qualify as fascist. The big difference is that communist countries pretend that the people have the rights, and the government is serving the people, but honestly, it's not that much different, is it?

Recently, the Chinese government has evicted people so it can host the Olympics. All they care about is how well they can host the Olympics, and are willing to cause many of its citizens discomfort or worse. Again, people are expected to give up their rights for the benefits of the state.

But then, many governments are like this, right? The more the central government exerts its rights, the more it says its citizen rights are not important, the more it fits this definition.

It's possible there is enough distinction between fascism and communism that I don't understand (I'm not referring to theoretical differences but how it's practiced).

In any case, the word loses a lot of meaning, because people simply don't understand what it means.