section_path: Definitions/Fascist as a pejorative
section_name: Fascist as a pejorative
paragraph_text: Fascist as a pejorative
  
  The term fascist has been used as a pejorative, regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics": while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, " as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless.... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist, ' ", and in 1946 wrote that "...'Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable." Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times". "Fascist" is sometimes applied to post-World War II organizations and ways of thinking that academics more commonly term neo-fascist.
  
  Despite fascist movements' history of anti-communism, Communist states have sometimes been referred to as fascist, typically as an insult. It has been applied to Marxist–Leninist regimes in Cuba under Fidel Castro and Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. Chinese Marxists used the term to denounce the Soviet Union during the Sino-Soviet split, and the Soviets used the term to denounce Chinese Marxists and social democracy, coining a new term in social fascism.
  
  In the United States, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times asked in 1946: "Should we now place Stalinist Russia in the same category as Hitlerite Germany? Should we say that she is Fascist?" J. Edgar Hoover, longtime FBI director and ardent anti-communist, wrote extensively of red fascism. The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was sometimes called fascist. Historian Peter Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental... never envisioned a change of political or economic system."