In the minds of the masses the concepts of fascism and patriotism are dichotomized, even polarized, but without understanding the meaning of such a strong emotional response. Many of those alive today have very little, if any, personal memory of the period before World War II. What you know, what you feel about that time is somehow connected to an overwhelming sense of wrong. The term "Holocaust" has its origins in the development of Nazism, fascism and the definitive racism that has come to define the European experience worldwide since the end of the First and Second World Wars. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Patriotism means love of country and implies a willingness to sacrifice oneself for it, to fight for it, perhaps even to give one's life for it" In the traditional or Spartan sense, patriots are those who love their country simply because it is their country, because it is "their birthplace and the abode of their fathers", as Alexis de Tocqueville says in his Democracy in Filial Piety America. But no one, not even a Spartan, is born loving his homeland, such love is not natural, but must be taught, or inculcated, or somehow acquired" (Berns, 1997, pp. PG). Although the definition of patriotism has the expectation that it must be learned, the connotation, the shared meaning within the current cultural context, requires that there be an element of free will to patriotism that is not part of the shared definition of policies totalitarian regimes of either fascism or Nazism. This element of choice makes the difference between committing your life to fighting for the love of your country and being forced and intimidated into obedience. There is also an element of equality associated with patriotism, as opposed to the subservience and servility that is inherent in social systems that are based on intolerance towards one's peers, such as Nazism and fascism to some extent. "Nazism and fascism emerged from the moral, social and intellectual crisis of Europe in the aftermath of the 1914-18 war. They were a set of responses not to the crisis in general but to what were identified as its main characteristics. L The ancient regime that still persisted in 1914 had moved towards granting the vote to all adult males, regardless of property or employment status: the war, in which entire adult male populations had been called upon to serve their country, accelerated at the same time this process during the revolution in Russia, and its echoes in Munich and Budapest, showed what could happen if the majority with little or no property decided to assert its strength against the society-owning minority, which argued that ownership the means of production by the idle few necessarily implied the expropriation of the many workers, they had already existed for seventy years but now took on a new immediacy with the overthrow of half of the monarchies of Europe, the creation of new states and the confiscation of political power by parties that claimed to represent the working classes" (Harvey, 1999, pp. 77). Fascism was a response to the political emancipation of the masses. "Fascism is reaction", said Mussolini. In a world where inequality of property had become far less significant than equality of citizenship, equality of duty, such as the equality of sacrifice and obligation experienced in the trenches during World War I, and equality of rights. Fascism developed this equality within the framework of the state, social equality was.