"These are not the droids you're looking for."

I'm beginning to think my mother was right, I am a genius. As a follow up to my post below, "Motherland vs Fatherland", I went to test my definition of fascism via the web. Here's what I found:

The term fascismo is derived from the Italian word fascio, which means "bundle" or group, and from the Latin word fasces. The fasces, which consisted of a bundle of rods that were tied around an axe, was an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate. Historians, political scientists and other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism. Each form of fascism is distinct, leaving many definitions too wide or narrow. Since the 1990s, scholars Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell, Roger Griffin and Robert O. Paxton have been gathering a rough consensus on the ideology's core tenets.

Griffin wrote:

"[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence."

Paxton wrote that fascism is:

"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Fascism is normally described as "extreme right" however the left-right terminology fails to describe the "spectral-syncretic" aspect of the ideology. Writers have found placing fascism on a conventional left-right political spectrum difficult. There is a scholarly consensus that fascism was influenced by both the left and the right, conservative and anti-conservative, national and supranational, rational and anti-rational. A number of historians have regarded fascism either as a revolutionary centrist doctrine, as a doctrine which mixes philosophies of the left and the right, or as both of those things. (source)

Oh, ok, well why didn't you say so?? That makes perfect sense! I think these people have been smoking Pete Moss.

Is it possible? That little ol' me, sitting in my apartment in Nevada, with no PhD to speak of has found the secret, unlocked the key, as to why historians and intellectuals across the spectrum have so labored, so strenuously attempted in vain to define fascism? Because they are tediously attempting to pin it (and pen it) as an ideology or form of government, when it truth it is as I said, the tactic, the act of maintaining a closed society or imposed economic system?