FASCISM

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 411.

Fascism is a political *ideology whose core theme is the idea of an organically unified national community, embodied in a belief in ‘strength through unity'. The individual, in a literal sense, is nothing; individual identity must be entirely absorbed into the community or social group. The fascist ideal is that of the ‘new man', a hero, motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, prepared to dedicate his life to the glory of his *nation or *race, and to give unquestioning

obedience to a supreme leader. In many respects, fascism constitutes a revolt against the ideas and values that dominated Western political thought from the French Revolution onwards; in the words of the Italian fascist slogan: ‘1789 is Dead'. Values such as *rationalism, progress, *freedom and *equality were thus overturned in the name of struggle, *leadership, *power, heroism and war. In this sense, fascism has an ‘anti-character'. It is defined largely by what it opposes: it is anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, anti-communist and so on. Fascism represents the darker side of the Western political tradition, the central values of which it transformed rather than abandoned. For fascists, freedom means complete submission, democracy is equated with dictatorship, progress implies constant struggle and war, and creation is fused with destruction.

Fascism has nevertheless been a complex historical phenomenon, and it is difficult to identify its core principles or a ‘fascist minimum'. For instance, although most commentators treat Mussolini's fascist *dictatorship in Italy and Hitler's Nazi dictatorship in Germany as the two principal manifestations of fascism, others regard fascism and *Nazism as distinct ideological traditions. Italian fascism was essentially an extreme form of statism that was based upon unquestioning respect and absolute loyalty towards a ‘totalitarian' state. As the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) put it, ‘everything for the state; nothing against the state; nothing outside the state'. German Nazism, on the other hand, was constructed largely on the basis of *racialism. Its two core theories were Aryanism (the belief that the German people constitute a ‘master race' and are destined for world domination) and a virulent form of anti-Semitism that portrayed the Jews as inherently evil and aimed at their eradication. Neo-fascism or ‘democratic fascism' claims to have distanced itself from principles such as charismatic leadership, *totalitarianism and overt racialism. It is a form of fascism that is often linked to anti-immigration campaigns and is associated with the growth of insular, ethnically or racially based forms of *nationalism that have sprung up as a reaction against *globalisation and *supranationalism.

Significance

Although the major ideas and doctrines of fascism can be traced back to the nineteenth century, they were fused together and shaped by the First World War and its aftermath, in particular by a potent mixture of war and *revolution. Fascism emerged most dramatically in Italy and Germany, manifest respectively in the Mussolini regime (1922–43) and the Hitler regime (1933–45). Some historians regard fascism as a specifically inter-war phenomenon, linked to a historically unique set of circumstances. These circumstances included: the First World War's legacy of disruption, lingering militarism and frustrated nationalism; the fact that in many parts of Europe democratic values had yet to replace older, autocratic ones; the threat to the lower middle classes of the growing might of big business and organised labour; the fears generated amongst propertied classes generally and elite groups in particular by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and the economic insecurity of the 1920s which deepened with the full-scale world economic crisis of the early 1930s. According to this view, fascism died in 1945 with the final collapse of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes, and it has been suppressed ever since by a combination of political stability and economic security. The late twentieth century nevertheless witnessed a renewal of fascism in the form of neo-fascism. Neo-fascism has been particularly influential in Eastern Europe, where it has sought to revive national rivalries and racial hatreds, and has taken advantage of the political instability that resulted from the collapse of *communism. However, it is questionable whether fascism can meaningfully adopt a ‘democratic' face, since this implies an accommodation with principles such as *pluralism, *toleration and *individualism.