Racism and Fascism

Good column in the Times about racism and fascism or more precisely the conflation between the two. Franco is an exemplar of a fascist who was not racist much to the chagrin of the contemporary left:

The Spanish dictator Franco was a Fascist but not a racist: in the 1930s, the left-wing New Statesman disparaged Franco as a “negrophile” (he employed Moroccan troops with gusto).

To be honest the classification of all non communist totalitarian regimes as fascist despite the minimal ideological connection between them is questionable, the ultra traditionalist Franco was not an ideological soulmate of the radical racial socialist Hitler for example.