To understand this, we first need to realize that fascism is a revolutionary movement, in the tradition of the French Revolution. As Goldberg puts it,
...the French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and Russian Communist revolutions. A nationalist-populist uprising, it was led and manipulated by an intellectual vanguard determined to replace Christianity with a political religion that glorified "the people," anointed the revolutionary vanguard as their priests, and abridged the rights of individuals.Revolution isn't exactly a conservative talking point, now is it? Or consider an early program of Mussolini, "the father of fascism": some of the things these early fascists wanted included a lowering of the minimum voting age, the end of the draft, the repeal of titles of nobility, a minimum wage, building "rigidly secular" schools for the proletariat, a large progressive tax system... in other words, a classically leftist platform. Fascism was, in a sense, a Bolshevik revolution minus internationalism. Consequently, many American progressives at the time were full of praise for Mussolini. Hitler was similarly anti-capitalist and anti-conservative. Writes Goldberg:
The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic- including environmentalism, health food, and exercise- and, most of all, the need to "transcend" notions of class.Goldberg leaves no doubt that fascism - both Mussolini's classical fascism and Hitler's Nazism - but also communism as fascism's equally-evil-twin - is in essence collectivist, anti-capitalist, anti-religion (except that it can use religion sometimes to further its aims), wants to control everything in the name of welfare, progress and for the "good of the people", uses science as a sort of priestly class to provide justification for the leaders of "the movement", hates the individual and always seeks to advance the collective... yep, exactly the Orwellian nightmare we see today, mostly on the left.
Comment: "...the special relationship [US-UK] is considered shameful by some critics, who say in essence it means that the UK simply does Washington's bidding in things like the Iraq invasion of 2003... "
No one was twisting UK's arm for involvement in Iraq. The UK willingly shared the 'glory' for the debacle and Tony Blair has a lot to answer for as does G.W.Bush. No excuses for the US, but England was a global bully long before the US came on the scene.
See also: