In his essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote, ‘The word fascism has now no meaning.’

Last weekend, I experienced this firsthand. I was attending my first CPAC Conference. After lunch, I stepped outside to get some fresh air. When I heard chanting and screeching, curiosity got the better of me and I went to investigate.

I saw a small group of pale people shouting about ‘fighting the right’ and ‘smashing fascism’. I quickly determined that these skinny, carefully masked-up youngsters posed no danger. They weren’t going to be fighting anyone, not without eating some red meat at least.

But their words struck me as odd, particularly since I was attending CPAC as part of a delegation from the Australian Jewish Association. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, who experienced first-hand what fascism is, I am hyper-vigilant about its dangers.

It got me thinking, where was this fascism they were protesting so vigorously?

I thought back to the talks I had just listened to that morning. Surely, they didn’t take issue with the all-Indigenous panel talking about why so many Indigenous people oppose the divisive Aboriginal ‘Voice’.

Did these activists think that Zion Lights, the climate advocate of Indian origin, was a fascist? Was it Michael Shellenberger, who ran as a Democrat candidate for California Governor that was getting them so worked up?

As I was thinking back to the diverse group of speakers I had listened to earlier that morning, something dawned on me. The protesters chanting about racism, while attempting to smash the windows and storm the convention centre, were almost exclusively white. While inside we listened to Nigerian and Japanese people share their points of view, outside, the gathered crowd was monolithic. The most diversity I saw was a girl with purple hair.

Ironically, it was on the t-shirts of the rent-a-crowd that one could find support for another historical injustice. Many of them unashamedly wore Marxism shirts. Perhaps they were unaware that the movement they were promoting has caused more deaths than even the Nazis.

It’s easy to laugh them off, but these far-left radicals represent something sinister. Whilst inside the conference, I hadn’t witnessed anything even close to fascism. These protesters, in trying to shut down free speech, were exhibiting aspects of it.

These zealots are just emulating their leaders on the left who call anything they don’t like, ‘fascist’. If you’ve read the news recently, you may have noticed, that instead of celebrating the election of Italy’s first-ever female Prime Minister, mainstream media labelled her a ‘fascist’. They do this because she refuses to bow down to Woke norms and proudly supports traditional values. Giorgia Meloni is in good company. Donald Trump, the most pro-Jewish president in US history, was also wrongly labelled a fascist and an antisemite.

As a rule of thumb, it’s likely that those being slandered with terms like racist or fascist provide a much better example than those doing the labelling, who are often themselves spewing hatred.

Much like the word racism, fascism has lost all meaning. Far-leftists have even attempted to label the Australian Jewish Association as fascist for representing common-sense values shared by the majority of Australia’s Jewish community. 

By labelling everything they disagree with as fascist and racist, leftists devalue truly horrific historical events. This is part of a wider trend of misappropriation. In recent years, the word ‘apartheid’ has been co-opted by extremists to slander the Jewish state. In the process, they diminish the horrors experienced in South Africa.

Dialogue and the exchange of ideas are hallmarks of Australia’s open society. In order to preserve what our ancestors so successfully built here, we must learn to disagree with others without labelling everything and everyone as fascist, racist, or Nazi.

Robert Gregory, Director of Public Affairs. Australian Jewish Association

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