Donald Trump and maga Republicans are bringing fascist history alive again as described by George Orwell

Donald Trump - George Orwell and Fascism....some echo comments: 

An autocrat is easy to underestimate

Echo essay by Mark Satta published in The Conversation (an excerpt):  In a 1942 essay written during the middle of World War II and reflecting on his experiences as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote that “our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens,” and that “we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.”

George Orwell was worried by these optimistic instincts because he thought they ran counter to the evidence. The evidence, on the contrary, suggested that things typically don’t turn out right on their own. Rather, social improvements normally require concerted effort and vigilance against backsliding.

In another essay from the same year, Orwell criticized various intellectuals who treated Hitler as “a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously.” And he criticized many English-speaking countries for being places where it was “fashionable to believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard.”

Echo opinion letter published in The Guardian news:

(Maine Writer: Hip Hip Hurray❗ Leave it up to George Orwell, author  of the prophetic novel 1984, to boil the concept of fascist down to one easy to spell and pronouncable word❗)

In 1944, George Orwell noted that “the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless”.

Emma Brockes points out that the word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot (The word ‘fascist’ has lost all meaning. And Trump is using that to his advantage, 23 October). 

It was the same in George Orwell’s day. In his 1944, Tribune column Orwell said that, “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless … I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922, Committee, the 1941, Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

The best definition he could come up with was to suggest that “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’”.

From Neil Smith in Solihull, West Midlands, in England