Abusing “Fascism”

What exactly don’t we like about it?

A very good former student asked me a couple of days ago: “What is fascism? … I hear the term … frequently today but don't believe it is used correctly; it's become more of an insult than a real analysis of current political landscapes. Why?”

All of my students’ questions are important: they express the desire to understand the empirical – actually existing – human world better, in an objective, scientific, way, based on logic and systematic use of comparisons. But this question is particularly important because it touches upon a conceptual confusion at the very center of the political conflict within traditionally, but no longer, liberal Western democracies. So, I am grateful for being asked this question and must answer it.

It is true, “fascism” is one of the most abused terms in contemporary political discourse; it is, I would argue, never used correctly; it is simply impossible to look for “a real analysis” in statements, oral or written, utilizing it, and this not only because it has been many decades ago reduced to an insult, but also because underneath this insult lies an intentional and devious lie perpetrated by socialists. I first encountered this use of “fascism” in the Soviet reference to the enemies of the Soviet Union during WWII as “Germano-fascist occupants.” I did not even know then that the German regime that instigated that colossal conflict was actually called “Nazi,” an abbreviation of “National Socialist,” and that only Germany’s junior and inconstant ally within the Axis powers, Italy, named itself, and its ideology, “fascist.” The other power that identified as fascist, Spain, was not a party to WWII at all, remaining neutral throughout the war. After emigrating to the West, as I learned about this I was puzzled by the consistent misapplication – in my mother-country and in the US -- of the moniker “fascist,” properly belonging to a neutral state and a minor ally innocent of crimes against humanity, to the major aggressor responsible for all atrocities committed by Axis powers in Europe, and on a number of occasions over thirty years wrote about it. The habit, I discovered, indeed came from the Soviet Union and was adopted elsewhere because of the tremendous influence Moscow has had over Western intellectuals, who traditionally sympathized with it due to their mental dependence, since the French Revolution, on the tropes of “left” and “right.”

As tropes, “left” has been associated with everything high-minded, moral, and good in politics, and “right” with the mean, immoral, and evil. That is to say, that it was enough to use these words in a political context, and immediately, unreflectively, hundreds of neural paths would provoke in the listener or reader an irresistible feeling of approbation whenever anything was characterized as “left” or a similarly irresistible feeling of disgust whenever something was characterized as “right.” In the eyes of the Western intelligentsia, socialism, an expression of collectivistic nationalism (as was argued in one of the recent posts) has stood for the left vision, and, for the time of its duration, the Soviet Union represented the country of the “left,” the geopolitical embodiment of this vision. It could never, therefore, lose the sympathies of the intelligentsia. Everything that opposed the Soviet Union was by definition “right.” The triumph of National Socialism in Germany, however, was “left” (as socialism) and “right” (as explicitly anti-Soviet ideology and regime) at once: it mixed the neural paths and threw a wrench into the brains of professional Western talkers and thinkers. As a result, it was decided in Moscow to occlude every association of the enemy with socialism and refer to it as fascism. Remarkably, during the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939-41, when the German regime was considered a friend to the Soviet Union, its authentic name, “National Socialism,” was restored both in the Soviet usage and that of Soviet sympathizers in the West. But the Pact was short-lived and nobody remembers this.

A gulf separates fascism from Nazism, which reflected the profound difference between Italian (and Spanish) and German nationalisms. Both were collectivistic, and thus favored socialist ideology and tended towards authoritarianism. But Italian (and Spanish) nationalism was civic and German nationalism was ethnic (i.e., racist). Civic nationalism is likely to emerge when the architects of the new consciousness find in the past of their community reasons to be proud of it, and both Italians and Spaniards found such reasons in their direct connection to the indisputably superior culture of Rome. Germany, by contrast, when in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries national consciousness was forming in it, was unarguably inferior to all the cultures to the West of it, from which its nationalism was imported. It had nothing to build its national identity on but the presumed virtues of its blood.

Fascism, in other words, did not imply racism. One of the greatest heroes of WWII, who managed to save the lives of some six thousand Jewish children, women, and men in occupied Budapest, spiriting them out of the clutches of Adolf Eichmann, was the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, an economic agent for Fascist Italy and FP member. He accomplished this with the help of the representative of Fascist Spain, Angel Sanz Briz (“the Angel of Budapest”). When asked, long after the war, why he, a fascist, had risked his life to save Jews, he answered: “I was neither a fascist nor an anti-fascist, I was an anti-Nazi.”

Fascism was a contemporary political movement with German National Socialism and Soviet Socialism. Like the other two, it was also socialist – that is, anti-individualist, in essence, but its name, derived from the Latin fasces, a word used in ancient Rome, to which nationalists in both Italy and Spain traced their respective nations, for a ceremonial bundle of rods symbolizing the power of the magistrate, in no way disclosed its nature. In Italy, the symbol fasci was originally used for syndicates, political organizations equivalent to guilds or trade unions. Before founding and becoming the leader of the Revolutionary Fascist Party (later the National Fascist Party of Italy which stood at the helm of the Italian Social Republic), Mussolini was a prominent socialist – the editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s newspaper Avanti!. He broke with ISP because it opposed Italy’s participation in World War I, but this was a change of organization not of heart.

Throughout the 19^th century in both Italy and Spain, national consciousness – the image of reality as composed of sovereign communities of fundamentally equal members – remained unattached to the geopolitical frameworks of the Italian and Spanish states each containing various linguistically and otherwise heterogeneous communities. Both were cases of unsuccessful, aborted nationalism. Fascism, in both cases, was state nationalism – an attempt to attach national consciousness to the polity, to impose a geopolitically focused nationalism from above. Emphatically a form of nationalism, fascism was by definition democratic, it was only opposed to the idea of individual as an autonomous actor, that is, to liberal democracy, an opposition it shared with socialism. Like other socialisms, the democracy it favored was authoritarian. Differing from socialism only in name, it should be associated with the “left,” but as Germany’s ally in WWII it is associated, on the insistence of the Soviet Union, with the “right.” George Orwell, a man of the left who went to Spain to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War, learned that there was no difference between rank-and-file fascists and rank-and-file communists who opposed them, just as there were no differences in falsehood and cruelty of their ideologues and commanders. “Roughly speaking,” he wrote in 1937, “I would say that Fascism has a great appeal for certain simple and decent people who genuinely want to see justice done to the working class.”

In Spain, fascism has a special significance because of the unique historical experience of the Civil War; the term, therefore, stands for a specific political position related to national identities of various communities within the Spanish state who refuse to unite into one people. There and only there one can meaningfully and honestly be an anti-fascist (or fascist). Everywhere else the word “fascist” is, as suggested in the student’s question, simply an insult, and those who call themselves anti-fascists are, if decent people, absolute idiots whose minimal IQ cannot protect them from wholesale brainwashing, or, if they have any intelligence above that minimal point, are dishonest envious humanoids, painfully aware of their own inferiority and meaninglessness and filled by this complex of inferiority with hatred. They call “fascists” everyone they hate. So, if you want to join the fashionable anti-fascist crowd, take your pick: you are either an idiot or a hate-filled mean-spirited envious being knowing deep-down that you belong to an inferior subspecies.

The only context where this universal expression of opprobrium, “fascism,” is consistently replaced with the more precise “Nazism” is the context in which Israel represents the main villain. Jews have no particular axe to grind with fascism and cannot be offended by being called “fascists.” Nazism, however, they met face to face and know it for what it is – the embodiment of unadulterated evil. There is no worse offense for the Jews than being compared to Nazis. And as hate-filled “anti-fascists” are invariably also antisemites, this is what they do.

Again, I thank my student for asking this question and invite others to ask questions.