In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”
That sense is back, and since the word is used so often again, I wanted to return to a foundation. I didn’t have clear memories from my undergraduate political science reading so I picked up Fascism, an influential, well-regarded, thick, dense, 400+ page collection of writings on the topic published in 1995 and edited by Oxford political theorist Roger Griffin.
It was a slog but a firm foundation, in which the point is argued that the word was almost immediately stretched and packed with various meanings from its modern launch in the 1920s. In the simplest interpretation I can put together, fascism is a political strategy “idealizing abstraction” that uses power to protect a “mythic core” of kinship around a nation from out-groups.
Judging by the 400-page book, and oodles of dissertations and academic writing, that’s of course incomplete. I have more listed below for that matter. But it does arm me with a clearer picture, grounded in academia and without cartoonish exaggeration. Below I have other notes from the book for future reference.
First, for my own memory: The term “fascism” originates from the Italian word “fascismo,” which itself is derived from the Latin word “fasces”. “Fasces” refers to a bundle of wooden rods with an axe, a Roman symbol of authority carried by lictors, representing strength through unity. The term was adopted by Benito Mussolini and his followers in Italy, who formed the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, later becoming the National Fascist Party.
Notes from the collection:
- Author cites Stephen Turner saying “no sociology” has “grasped fascism fully”
- Fascism “ultimately results from an active idealizing abstraction, which produces an artificially tidy model of the kinship that exists within a group of phenomenon which, despite their differences, or sensed to have certain features in common”
- “The idea that a ‘nation’ is an entity which can ‘decay’ and be ‘regenerated’ implies something diametrically opposed to what liberals understand by it.”
- “Fascism is a genius of political ideology who is mythic core and its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra nationalism“
- Matrix of fascist ideology: anti liberal (intolerant); anti-conservative (calls for revolution); reliant on charisma; anti-rational (heroic action not fact); socialism in its own way (new true shared nationalism; “ rewarding, all productive members of the new nation, and harnessing the energies of capitalism and technology in a new order in which they cease to be exploitative and enslaving”); totalitarianism (utopian for a cleansed state); heterogenous in its support (across class and type); racist (ultra nationalist and anti-cosmopolitan); internationalism (only insofar of connecting across similar fascist leads) and fascist is eclecticism by pulling from many thread
- Author writing in summer 1994 questioning whether Vladimir Zhirinovky would become Russian president (he didn’t)
- This book isn’t revisionist nor rehabilitate fascism but to give it definition as a political ideology
- Author capitalizes Fascism when it’s Mussolini’s movement and fascism for its more general usage
- “After the first world war, Fascism started out as a revolutionary movement pledge to carry the generation of the trenches and of the ‘new Italy’ into power”
- Mussolini: “We fascists have no intention of coming to power by the tradesmen‘s entrance.”
- 1927 Mino Maccari: “We have no desire to abolish maternity; we are not nostalgic for any past century; it is just that we would like to see a modernity which is more Italian than American or German, and our century more in harmony with a traditional Italian spirit, with customs, with a mentality, with habits which are peculiar to our people and rooted in generations of Italians”
- Ed Randall Britain Aware and a Marching Song: poet naming fascist as a movement
- By 1914, liberals and Marxists were confident that their movement was “in the vanguard of history” and so fascist type language appeared as fringe — they overlooked growing number of residents who felt disconnected (they fell to fascism)
- 1980 collection: “Who were the fascists”
- “New Right spokesmen would doubtless reject the term fascist, but they make no secret of their debt to a form of political myth making” ..developed by these early fascist leaders
- Leon Degrelle’s 1979 letter to the Pope on visiting Auschwitz, showing this kind of denial of history