"When politically mobilized majorities (or politicians acting in their name) single out minorities for oppression, writers reach for historically loaded comparisons. Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbn, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Erdogan, Aung San Suu Kyi, Xi Jinping, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Bashar al-Assad, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu have all been called fascist and this is not an exhaustive list.
"The appropriateness of this label is complicated by two considerations. One, can a political tendency so closely associated with the histories of Germany, Italy and Japan between the World Wars be usefully generalized to describe other polities removed in both time and space? Two, is it accurate to describe right-wing governments in internally democratic and externally peaceful countries as fascist when the signature trait of historic fascisms like Germany's and Japan's was genocidal, warmongering violence?"
Mukul Kesavan in search of actually existing fascism. Read the column
here.