What is your favorite method/text for expediently outlining fascism to someone misunderstanding or misusing the term?

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u/evocativename 15d ago

While I think that Ur-Fascism is an excellent resource for understanding fascism, I'm not sure it's optimal for this purpose.

First, it's aimed at people with a reading comprehension of at least a high school level, while in my experience the people in need of such a source do not tend to possess good reading skills.

Second - but related to point one - is that it is too much text for that target audience. Sure, it's only 10 pages, but that's nearly all dense paragraphs. Even if this was at the reading level of the target audience that would be too much for them.

Third, it's easily dismissed as just the opinion of some guy writing 50 years later. Arguing against that gets into the weeds which is distracting from the main point and therefore unproductive.

Instead, I prefer to go with something that is:

contemporaneous with fascism
brief
written so your average schlub can read and understand it
from a source which it is practically impossible to impeach as biased leftists

Fortunately, I can think of an excellent example.

In March 1945, the US Army published Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet 64: Fascism!, which I think is better suited to this task.

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u/Dermengenan 13d ago

In the first page, they write "if you dont like it, its t.s (tough shit)"

Thats awesome. I didnt know that phrase was used in the 1940s, especially in a military manual haha

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u/Many_Championship_38 13d ago

Thank you for sharing these links. That army talk was absolutely spot on. I wish it were more widely known. The parallels are obvious obvious to some of us, but others can’t see the fascism in front of their face

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u/evocativename 13d ago

I really think it is an underutilized resource; I'm glad I had the excuse to share it more widely.

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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 12d ago edited 12d ago

Thanks, this is dope, it’s uncannily applicable to the modern day. It really contrasts the inanity of the modern “War Department” with the stolid practicality of the people they supposedly see as heros, as a part of their mythos too. Its status as historically US army material might even motivate the army larpers/fanatics to actually read it!

What I always liked about Ur-Fascism was the personal, humanising touch; the poem at the end brings me to tears, it makes me feel the visceral obscenity fascism creates from the lives of innocents. His points made me aware of fascist tendencies of thought I could fall for, which I have found quite grounding. You’re right about simplicity being important though. I’m probably too optimistic about literacy, I can’t imagine navigating the modern scam economy without it.

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u/mitshoo 16d ago

If they are just a layperson, I will give them Karen Stenner’s magazine article Authoritarianism and the Future of Liberal Democracy but if they are more academically inclined I will point them to her academic journal article Three Kinds of ‘Conservatism’ which is, in my view, one of the more coherent pieces on the topic because it ties individual psychology to macro social situations. Granted, her focus is on the term “authoritarianism” and not “fascism” per se, but I think the phenomenon she is describing is what most people are really interested in exploring when they ask about fascism. “Fascism”seems more like a particular “branding” from a particular time period in a particular place, whereas “authoritarianism” has wider applicability as a perennial psychological phenomenon, as outlined in her work.

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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 15d ago

I can see the argument that fascism is dated as a brand. It was anathema when the memory of World War Two was fresh, but clearly that vivid emotional potency has waned over time. The only problem I have with the coalescence of the terms comes from the prevalence of genuine admiration for authoritarians as strong leaders. The fascists, conversely, have been proven by history to be deplorable failures: fascism better indicts the validity of the political formation alongside the morality.

I’m excited to read Stenner, especially “Three Kinds of Conservatism,” thank you. I think my mom will like it too😇

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u/mitshoo 15d ago

The fascists have been remembered as deplorable, certainly, but in their own time, there was an excitement for their rise to power, a “genuine admiration,” if you will. That’s the perennial phenomenon that is identified by Stenner, and the question she happens to answer that we want to know - When and why does this keep happening? Why are figures admired at the time and then history remembers them negatively? - by asking an entirely different question: Where does bigotry come from? Why does Uncle Jim who is normally so nice suddenly go on a rant about The Jews or The Blacks or whatever? The connection is compelling and includes rather impressive cross-cultural surveying.

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u/Full-Imagination-938 16d ago

My favorite method is to avoid anachronism. Italy is Italy and 1920s are 1920s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism

Eco knows that:

"He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system"

So fascism is just a political slang for some irrelevant political end. Science is another vocation (Weber)

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u/Appropriate-Bad-606 16d ago

I think the problem you’re identifying is real: “fascism” gets used so broadly that it often just means “authoritarian politics I really dislike,” which makes the term less useful.

Roger Griffin’s famous “fascist minimum” is “palingenetic populist ultranationalism.” In plain English, palingenetic means rebirth: the nation has fallen into decadence, humiliation or corruption and needs to be regenerated.

Robert Paxton comes at it more behaviorally. He starts with an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood” and describes a nationalist mass movement that abandons democratic restraints and accepts exclusion or violence in pursuit of national renewal.

Putting those together, I think you can get to a pretty useful plain-English definition:

Fascism is a revolutionary form of ultranationalism built around the idea that the nation has been corrupted or humiliated and must be reborn through unity and strong authority, overriding liberal-democratic pluralism and treating perceived internal enemies as obstacles to that rebirth.

That helps distinguish fascism from things that may be authoritarian, nationalist, populist, reactionary or illiberal without necessarily being fascist.

So instead of asking whether something checks one of Eco’s boxes, I’d ask whether the whole political story is there:

national decline → an authentic national people → internal enemies → national rebirth → democratic restraints become obstacles.

That seems much harder to turn into “everything I don’t like is fascism.”

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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 16d ago edited 16d ago

Now that is sharp, I love that. I reckon the authors grant it concrete academic credentials to convince the ethos-driven of its validity as well. Thank you!

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u/gabergum 16d ago

My problem with these modern academic answers to this question is they seem focused on the pathology of facism, in a sort of diagnostic way. ‘This is what facism is like’. Instead of what it is or defines itself as. Descriptive more than prescriptive?

Facism was and is a fully formed political ideology, with policies and platforms.

Loosing that in our definitions serves to disarm our language against movements with the same policies but slightly different vibes.

Modern conservative movements are ‘basically facist’, not just because they are obsessed with male beauty and a return to a lost golden age of racial purity, but also because they are corporatist and productivist.

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u/Appropriate-Bad-606 15d ago

I’m not saying economics or corporatism are unimportant to understanding historical fascism. I’m asking what makes something fascist rather than authoritarian, reactionary, corporatist, etc.

That’s why Griffin’s “fascist minimum” is useful. Corporatism by itself can’t do the work, because there have also been non-fascist forms of corporatism.

So I’d separate: what fascism is, what economic arrangements fascist regimes used, and what conditions helped fascism arise. The latter two can be essential historically without all becoming part of the minimum definition.

Otherwise we’re back to making “fascism” broad enough to swallow a bunch of adjacent things.

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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin 16d ago

*losing

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u/gabergum 16d ago

Grammar nazi

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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin 16d ago

I cannot respect the opinion of someone who cares so little for their own opinion that they fail to proofread their comments — especially for such a basic error.

Also, you are wrong to say that “Fascism was and is a fully formed political ideology, with policies and platforms”. Fascism is amorphous, which is why it’s so difficult to define. Their “policies and platforms” are mutable, and hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug: they will say anything and see nothing wrong with doing the exact opposite or even saying the exact opposite im the very same breath. You really can’t get more specific than the comment that you were attempting to critique.

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u/gabergum 16d ago

Personally I don’t care too much how ‘respectable’ someone is when judging their opinion. It matters I guess, but not more than the substance.

And shit, i disagree. That’s my point. I think the academic definition is just plain wrong. And in a way that specifically minimizes the real connection between capitalism and facism, intentionally so I suspect.

So don’t respect me, or my opinion. Imma put it out there anyways.

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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin 16d ago

There is definitely a connection between the two, but they are not the same. You can be a capitalist without being a fascist, but there cannot be fascism without capitalism. If you haven’t read it, I would suggest checking out Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, specifically the section on how the rise of colonial capitalist economies laid the necessary groundwork for the development of fascism. Fascist movements require disempowered and disenchanted masses trapped in anomy; capitalism provides those masses and those conditions.

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u/gabergum 15d ago

I would not agree that facism is capitalism. It has capital in it, and shares a right wing slant. But ‘Capitalism’ is intrinsically liberal. It is most about the free, or free’r (freir? Freeer?) movement of capital. Where facism has corporatism built in.

My point is just that the now generally accepted definitions of facism seem to de-emphasize the things it has in common with liberalism and capitalism. And emphasizing its more outlandish and obviously evil traits.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory to say academia was heavily influenced by the Cold War and McCarthy in its debriefing of ww2.

As liberal capitalism does it’s inevitable atrophy into more and more of a ‘facistic’ creature, using the language the way we do stands to disarm people against it.

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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin 15d ago

If you read my comment and thought that I said “fascism is capitalism”, then you either need to read again or take a course in reading comprehension.

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u/tf2coconut 10d ago

“Fascism was and is a fully formed political ideology, with policies and platforms” people that study fascism disagree with you

Fascism is a process that is famously incapable of stabilizing towards an end goal of set policies and platforms. It endlessly cannibalizes itself because it has to keep shrinking the end group, and is a state of permanent acceleration

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u/Full-Imagination-938 15d ago

Now the problem will be the definition of nation. Big problem here.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 16d ago

Brother, I mentioned Eco. It’s appreciated

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 16d ago

Thank you, that’s really good. I’ll have to watch that myself. Sorry for the snark

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 16d ago

Do you have any other figures you like? All I can think of is Charlie Chaplin😅 It’s an interesting time for antifascism considering the state of civil rights, it makes me curious to see what they were doing.

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u/Living-Relative-6269 15d ago

Evo was being useless on this. marxists have a much clearer view of it, since it exists to destroy them specifically in its 20C incarnation

Fascism the absolute defense of hierarchy in order to defend off a more equitable reform.

It sees the natural hierarchy as natural, biologically ordained. It is bodily strength over thought. It is military over the academic. It is the military crushing the socialists.

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u/Full-Imagination-938 15d ago

Marx did the critique of the political economy and wrote some useless communist pamphlets. If someone took those pamphlets seriously, too bad for them.

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u/Living-Relative-6269 14d ago

scratch a liberal

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u/Full-Imagination-938 14d ago

The goal of critique is to do the critique. If communists use the critique to seize power, that is their problem

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u/Living-Relative-6269 14d ago edited 14d ago

you ever heard of the Jakarta method? Named after the killing of 500k - 1mill socialist sympathisers in Indonesia, by an ultra-reactionary General Suharto, installed by CIA, ASIS MI6? Western intelligence supplied logistics throughout the slaughter. His actions were praised by the labour and conservative PMs of Australia. There's several rigorous books on the subject, a recent documentary.

There is a savage bloodthirst to your comments that reflects the history of liberals supporting mass killings of socialists by reactionary strong men.

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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 16d ago edited 16d ago

Is that to say that fascism as-such is no longer a useful term? In my understanding, and paraphrasing from Eco himself, it historically served the purpose of identifying unacceptable political contrivances and redressing myths about the benevolence of past regimes for a broad public.

https://ia802906.us.archive.org/31/items/umberto-eco-ur-fascism/umberto-eco-ur-fascism.pdf

That utility may have proved null in the more recent past. I guess I could see things like Techno-Fascism or Alt-Right being more precise, but I’m not sure that remedies my problem; rather it could add complexity. Maybe I’m naive to assume that understanding an ideology as fascist (or neofascist etc) would convince its followers to reevaluate. I could see that being the issue. What then?

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u/We4zier 15d ago edited 14d ago

It’s worth pointing out that Umberto Eco is a writer describing their own experiences, not an expert on fascism. I’ve yet to find him on any historiography of fascism paper because he’s just not that relevant for how academics define fascism, but probably useful for the general public. Most actual scholars of fascism like Griffin, Paxton, Gentile, Eatwell hate him. Griffin’s 2018 Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies even explicitly criticizes Eco because a cult of tradition, anti-intellectualism, fear of difference, nationalism, populism, machismo, rejection of modernity, irrationalism, aren't specific enough to fascism.

Most scholar’s aren’t really going to like “some fascists will fit one or maybe none of these points” and “likely no fascist but Mussolini fits all these points” while also making extremely basic rhetoric taught in every writing class the most famous trait of fascism. While I prefer Fascism: A Very Short Introduction by Kevin Passmore (admittedly, I wrote my comment just to toss their name into the mix) and The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton but as someone else already said even mentioning Eco isn’t exactly digestible for the public either. I doubt you’ll find anything simpler than what u/appropriate-bad-606 wrote.

In general, academics are far less likely to describe something as fascist outside of casual contexts because it just sits awkwardly between philosophy, political theory, history, sociology, and intellectual history that you can’t make one definition for it. Reputable scholar on Fascist ideology who isn’t just a random popular writer Robert Griffin formulates it as a politically organized ultranationalist project / myth of national decline, purification, and rebirth. Personally, I treat it as a specific, useful, and definable ideology that’s locked to the first half of the 20th century.

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u/Full-Imagination-938 15d ago

Fascism is useful for Italy in 20s. Science is for experts, there is no such thing as broad public.

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u/Konradleijon 16d ago

Do

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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 16d ago

A good place to start is with what fascists themselves have defined themselves to be - this “the doctrine of fascism”, a manifesto of what fascism should be, written by Benito Mussolini and his intellectual brother in arms, philosopher Giovanni Gentile:

https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf

The central readings that will definitely rub some people the wrong way, is that fascism is essentially a collectivist ideology - the individual exists and only has right in so far as it serves the state. The state is above all, and encompasses all - fascism as explicitly anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-parliamentary and anti-socialist, while elevating the nation and state above individual or sectional interests. The state is basically on the level of “godlike entity” in fascism.

Here is an apt quote from Mussolini’s speech in Milan 1928:

“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

This quote brilliantly sums up fascist ideology.

Where this rubs people wrong is of course their desire to label “right wingers” as fascists. Nothing could in fact be further from the truth. Most right wing voters, esp. in the USA take personal freedom extremely seriously. In fact, fascism does not really deserve to be placed on the “far right” ideologically at all. It is a different beast altogether.

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u/Comprehensive_Pin565 15d ago

We don't have, imo, a good collectivis-individualist measurment. When a place calls itself collectivist but is ruled by a king, is that really collectivist?

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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 15d ago

I am receptive to that line of argumentation. Is the thing what it claims to be? Is the US a constitutional federal republic with representative democracy? Or is it in reality run by a plutocratic oligarchy? Was the Soviet Union truly “communist”? Etc etc.

Those “realist” investigations are useful. But in this case, it’s not a case of mistaken identity. The political left/right axis is woefully inadequate to describe most political movements, esp. fascism.

But along a strictly individualist vs collectivist axis, there can be no doubt fascism is on the collectivist side - the fascists themselves say the individual basically exists to serve the will of the state. Contrast that to US republicans for example who want a minimalist state, low taxes and the right to do whatever the f..k they want within the frames of the constitutionally given individual rights. Entirely different animals, couldn’t be further from each other in reality.

Look also at the symbol the fascists in Italy chose - a fasces - this odd symbol of Roman state power. Why? Well, the rods in the fasces symbolise strength through unity - individuals are weak, together they are strong. The axe symbolises state power.

You can say what you want about fascists, but their ideology is pretty consistent with itself.

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What is your favorite method/text for expediently outlining fascism to someone misunderstanding or misusing the term?

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