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Literature "Fascist Manifesto" (1919) Mein Kampf (1925) My Autobiography (1928) The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) La Conquista del Estado (1931) "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932) Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948) Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) The Last Will of a Russian Fascist (2001)
Organizations National Fascist Party Blackshirts Squadrismo Nazi Party Gestapo Hitler Youth RAD SA SS Iron Guard Ustaše Ustaše Youth Blueshirts British Union of Fascists Stewards Brazilian Integralist Action Silver Legion of America Fatherland Front FE de las JONS National Radical Camp National Christian Party Rexist Party Axis powers FET y de las JONS Slovak People's Party Arrow Cross Party Imperial Rule Assistance Association Great Japan Youth Party Yokusan Sonendan Republican Fascist Party Kataeb Party
History March on Rome Beer Hall Putsch Aventine Secession Second Italo-Senussi War Mukden Incident German election of 1932 Enabling Act Austrian Civil War 1934 Montreux Fascist conference Second Italo-Ethiopian War Spanish Civil War Unification Decree Battle of Cable Street Second Sino-Japanese War Marco Polo Bridge Incident Japanese war crimes Anti-Comintern Pact Kristallnacht Italian invasion of Albania Pact of Steel World War II The Holocaust Downfall in Italy Downfall in Germany Surrender of Japan Nasjonal Samling Nuremberg trials International Military Tribunal for the Far East
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Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,^[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.^[2][3]

Fascism rose to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.^[4][5] The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before spreading to other European countries, most notably Germany.^[4] Fascism also had adherents outside of Europe.^[6] Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism,^[7][8] fascism is placed on the far-right wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.^[4][8][9]

Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and the mass mobilization of society erased the distinction between civilians and combatants. A military citizenship arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner.^[10] The war resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and providing logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.^[10]

Fascism rejects assertions that violence is inherently negative or pointless, instead viewing imperialism, political violence, and war as means to national rejuvenation.^[11][12] Fascists often advocate for the establishment of a totalitarian one-party state,^[13][14] and for a dirigiste^[15][16] economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky (national economic self-sufficiency) through economic interventionist policies. Fascism's extreme authoritarianism and nationalism often manifest as a belief in racial purity or a master race, usually blended with some variant of racism or discrimination against a demonized "Other", such as Jews, homosexuals, ethnic minorities or immigrants. These ideas have motivated fascist regimes to commit massacres, forced sterilizations, deportations, and genocides.^[17] During World War II, the actions of the fascist Axis powers, with their genocidal and imperialist ambitions, caused the death of millions of people.

Since the end of World War II in 1945, fascism as an ideology has been largely disgraced and few parties have openly described themselves as fascist; the term is more often used pejoratively by political opponents. The descriptions of neo-fascist or post-fascist are sometimes employed to describe contemporary parties with ideologies similar to, or rooted in, 20th-century fascist movements.^[4][18] Some opposition groups have adopted the label anti-fascist or antifa to signify their stance.^[19]

Etymology

The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio, meaning 'bundle of sticks', ultimately from the Latin word fasces.^[3] This was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci, groups similar to guilds or syndicates. According to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's own account, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in Italy in 1915.^[20] In 1919, Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan, which became the National Fascist Party two years later. The fascists came to associate the term with the ancient Roman fasces or fascio littorio,^[21] a bundle of rods tied around an axe,^[22] an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate^[23] carried by his lictors.^[24]

The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break.^{[25][page needed]} Similar symbols were developed by different fascist movements: for example, the Falange symbol is five arrows joined by a yoke.^{[26][page needed]}

Definitions

Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism.^{[27][page needed]} Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."^[28] Each different group described as fascist has at least some unique elements, and many definitions of fascism have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow.^[29] According to many scholars, fascism—especially once in power—has historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right.^[30]

Frequently cited as a standard definition by notable scholars,^[31] such as Roger Griffin,^[32] Randall Schweller,^[33] Bo Rothstein,^[34] Federico Finchelstein,^[35] and Stephen D. Shenfield,^[36] is that of historian Stanley G. Payne.^[37] His definition of fascism focuses on three concepts:

1. "Fascist negations" – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.
2. "Fascist goals" – the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure and to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture, and the expansion of the nation into an empire.
3. "Fascist style" – a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth, and charismatic authoritarian leadership.^[38]

Umberto Eco lists fourteen "features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it".^[39]

In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism as "a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation" and that "The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors." Stanley says recent global events as of 2020^[update], including the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020–2022 United States racial unrest, have substantiated his concern about how fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world.^[40]

Historian John Lukacs argues that there is no such thing as generic fascism. He claims that Nazism and communism are essentially manifestations of populism, and that states such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are more different from each other than they are similar.^[41]

Roger Griffin describes fascism as "a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism."^[42] Without paligenetic ultranationalism, there is no "genuine fascism" according to Griffin.^{[43][page needed][44]} Griffin further describes fascism as having three core components: "(i) the rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism, and (iii) the myth of decadence."^[45] In Griffin's view, fascism is "a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism" built on a complex range of theoretical and cultural influences. He distinguishes an inter-war period in which it manifested itself in elite-led but populist "armed party" politics opposing socialism and liberalism, and promising radical politics to rescue the nation from decadence.^{[46][page needed]}

Kershaw argues that the difference between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism in the Interwar period is that the latter generally aimed "to conserve the existing social order", whereas fascism was "revolutionary", seeking to change society and obtain "total commitment" from the population.^[47]

In Against the Fascist Creep, Alexander Reid Ross writes regarding Griffin's view: "Following the Cold War and shifts in fascist organizing techniques, a number of scholars have moved toward the minimalist 'new consensus' refined by Roger Griffin: 'the mythic core' of fascism is 'a populist form of palingenetic ultranationalism.' That means that fascism is an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the 'new man.'"^[48] Griffin himself explored this 'mythic' or 'eliminable' core of fascism with his concept of post-fascism to explore the continuation of Nazism in the modern era.^[49] Additionally, other historians have applied this minimalist core to explore proto-fascist movements.^[50][51]

Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser argue that although fascism "flirted with populism ... in an attempt to generate mass support", it is better seen as an elitist ideology. They cite in particular its exaltation of the Leader, the race, and the state, rather than the people. They see populism as a "thin-centered ideology" with a "restricted morphology" that necessarily becomes attached to "thick-centered" ideologies such as fascism, liberalism, or socialism. Thus populism can be found as an aspect of many specific ideologies, without necessarily being a defining characteristic of those ideologies. They refer to the combination of populism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism as "a marriage of convenience".^[52]

Robert Paxton says: " a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."^[53]

Roger Eatwell defines fascism as "an ideology that strives to forge social rebirth based on a holistic-national radical Third Way",^[54] while Walter Laqueur sees the core tenets of fascism as "self-evident: nationalism; social Darwinism; racialism, the need for leadership, a new aristocracy, and obedience; and the negation of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution."^[55]

Historian Emilio Gentile has defined fascism as "a modern political phenomenon, revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist, organized in a militia party with a totalitarian conception of politics and the State, an activist and anti-theoretical ideology, with a mythical, virilistic and anti-hedonistic foundation, sacralized as a secular religion, which affirms the absolute primacy of the nation, understood as an ethnically homogeneous organic community, hierarchically organized in a corporate state, with a bellicose vocation to the politics of greatness, power and conquest aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization".^[56]

Historian and cultural critic Ruth Ben-Ghiat has described fascism as "the original phase of authoritarianism, along with early communism, when a population has undergone huge dislocations or they perceive that there's been changes in society that are very rapid, too rapid for their taste." and added that "These are moments when demagogues appeal. Mussolini was the first to come up after the war, and he promised this enticing mixture of hypernationalism and imperialism, like, 'We're gonna revive the Roman Empire.'"^[57]

Racism was a key feature of German fascism, for which the Holocaust was a high priority. According to The Historiography of Genocide, "In dealing with the Holocaust, it is the consensus of historians that Nazi Germany targeted Jews as a race, not as a religious group."^[58] Umberto Eco,^[39] Kevin Passmore,^[59] John Weiss,^{[60][page needed]} Ian Adams,^{[61][page needed]} and Moyra Grant^[62] stress racism as a characteristic component of German fascism. Historian Robert Soucy stated that "Hitler envisioned the ideal German society as a Volksgemeinschaft, a racially unified and hierarchically organized body in which the interests of individuals would be strictly subordinate to those of the nation, or Volk."^[63] Kershaw noted that common factors of fascism included "the 'cleansing' of all those deemed not to belong – foreigners, ethnic minorities, 'undesirables'" and belief in its own nation's superiority, even if it was not biological racism like in Nazism.^[47] Fascist philosophies vary by application, but remain distinct by one theoretical commonality: all traditionally fall into the far-right sector of any political spectrum, catalyzed by afflicted class identities over conventional social inequities.^[4]

Position on the political spectrum

Scholars place fascism on the far-right of the political spectrum.^[4][8][9] Such scholarship focuses on its social conservatism and its authoritarian means of opposing egalitarianism.^[65] Roderick Stackelberg places fascism—including Nazism, which he says is "a radical variant of fascism"—on the political right by explaining: "The more a person deems absolute equality among all people to be a desirable condition, the further left he or she will be on the ideological spectrum. The more a person considers inequality to be unavoidable or even desirable, the further to the right he or she will be."^[66]

Fascism's origins are complex and include many seemingly contradictory viewpoints, ultimately centered on a mythos of national rebirth from decadence.^[46] Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who drew upon both left-wing organizational tactics and right-wing political views.^[67] Italian Fascism gravitated to the right in the early 1920s.^[68] A major element of fascist ideology that has been deemed to be far right is its stated goal to promote the right of a supposedly superior people to dominate, while purging society of supposedly inferior elements.^[69]

In the 1920s, Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile described their ideology as right-wing in the political essay The Doctrine of Fascism, stating: "We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right,' a fascist century."^[70] Mussolini stated that fascism's position on the political spectrum was not a serious issue for fascists: "fascism, sitting on the right, could also have sat on the mountain of the center. These words in any case do not have a fixed and unchanged meaning: they do have a variable subject to location, time and spirit. We don't give a damn about these empty terminologies and we despise those who are terrorized by these words."^[71]

Major Italian groups politically on the right, especially rich landowners and big business, feared an uprising by groups on the left, such as sharecroppers and labour unions.^[72] They welcomed fascism and supported its violent suppression of opponents on the left.^[73] The accommodation of the political right into the Italian Fascist movement in the early 1920s created internal factions within the movement. The "Fascist left" included Michele Bianchi, Giuseppe Bottai, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Sergio Panunzio, and Edmondo Rossoni, who were committed to advancing national syndicalism as a replacement for parliamentary liberalism in order to modernize the economy and advance the interests of workers and the common people.^[74] The "fascist right" included members of the paramilitary Blackshirts and former members of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI).^[74] The Blackshirts wanted to establish fascism as a complete dictatorship, while the former ANI members, including Alfredo Rocco, sought to institute an authoritarian corporatist state to replace the liberal state in Italy while retaining the existing elites.^[74] Upon accommodating the political right, there arose a group of monarchist fascists who sought to use fascism to create an absolute monarchy under King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.^[74]

After the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy, when King Victor Emmanuel III forced Mussolini to resign as head of government and placed him under arrest in 1943, Mussolini was rescued by German forces. While continuing to rely on Germany for support, Mussolini and the remaining loyal Fascists founded the Italian Social Republic with Mussolini as head of state. Mussolini sought to re-radicalize Italian Fascism, declaring that the fascist state had been overthrown because Italian fascism had been subverted by Italian conservatives and the bourgeoisie.^[75] Then the new fascist government proposed the creation of workers' councils and profit-sharing in industry, although the German authorities, who effectively controlled northern Italy at this point, ignored these measures and did not seek to enforce them.^[75]

A number of post-World War II fascist movements described themselves as a Third Position outside the traditional political spectrum. Falange Española de las JONS leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera said: "asically the Right stands for the maintenance of an economic structure, albeit an unjust one, while the Left stands for the attempt to subvert that economic structure, even though the subversion thereof would entail the destruction of much that was worthwhile."^[76]

Fascist as a pejorative

The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,^[77] 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,'"^[78][emphasis added], and in 1946 wrote that "...'Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."^[79]

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.^[80] 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^[81] 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?"^[82] J. Edgar Hoover, longtime FBI director and ardent anti-communist, wrote extensively of red fascism.^[83] 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."^[84]

Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".^[85]: 1 "Fascist" is sometimes applied to post-World War II organizations and ways of thinking that academics more commonly term neo-fascist.^[86]

History

Background and 19th-century roots

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