What is Fascism?

Paul_in_Qatar · January 23, 2011, 1:21am

Down in the Pit, I am cruising for a bruising by maintaining that modern Islamic political thought is Fascist. I have long held that Fascism is the idea that the 'race," “community,” or “society” has rights it may impose on the individual.

Or I might be wrong. **What is Fascism? What is the best existent example of it in action? **

XT · January 23, 2011, 4:09am

Well, the definition I remember is that fascism is an authoritative (totalitarian and sometimes coupled with a dictatorship, though not always) hierarchical government that advocates nationalism over individual rights.

FWIW, here is what Wiki has to say:

Fascism (pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology.[1][2][3][4] Fascists seek to organize a country according to a particular nationalist strand of corporatist values and perspectives, with an emphasis on enforcing a collectivist form of political and economic organisation based on a tightly prescribed national identity.[5][6] Fascism was originally founded by Italian national syndicalists in World War I who combined extreme Sorelian syndicalist political views along with nationalism.[7][8][9] Though normally described as being on the far right, there is a scholarly consensus that fascism was also influenced by the left, but with a focus on solutions from the right.[10][11][12][7][13]

Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong.[14] They claim that culture is created by the collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism.[14] Viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety.[15][16]

They advocate the creation of a single-party state.[17] Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement.[18] They identify violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.[19]

Fascism rejects the concepts of egalitarianism, materialism, and rationalism in favour of action, discipline, hierarchy, spirit, and will.[20] They oppose liberalism (as a bourgeois movement) and Marxism (as a proletarian movement) for being exclusive economic class-based movements.[21] Fascists present their ideology as that of an economically trans-class movement that promotes ending economic class conflict to secure national solidarity.[22] They believe that economic classes are not capable of properly governing a nation, and that a merit-based elite of experienced military persons must rule through regimenting a nation’s forces of production and securing the nation’s independence.[23] Fascism perceives conservatism as partly valuable for its support of order in society but disagrees with its typical opposition to change and modernization.[24] Fascism presents itself as a solution to the perceived benefits and disadvantages of conservatism by advocating state-controlled modernization that promotes orderly change while resisting the dangers to order in society of pluralism and independent initiative.[24]

Fascists tend to support a “third position” in economic policy, which they believe superior to both the rampant individualism of laissez-faire capitalism and the severe control of state socialism.[25][26] Italian Fascism and most other fascist movements promote a corporatist economy whereby, in theory, representatives of capital and labour interest groups work together within sectoral corporations to create both harmonious labour relations and maximization of production that would serve the national interest.[27] However, other fascist movements and ideologies, such as Nazism, did not use this form of economy.[27]

Definitions
Main article: Definitions of fascism

Historians, political scientists and other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism.[32] Each form of fascism is distinct, leaving many definitions too wide or narrow.[33][34] Since the 1990s, scholars Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell, Roger Griffin and Robert O. Paxton have been gathering a rough consensus on the ideology’s core tenets.

Griffin wrote:

[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.[35]

Paxton wrote that fascism is:

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.[36]

One common definition of fascism focuses on three groups of ideas:

a) Fascist Negations

   1. Anti-liberalism
   2. Anti-communism
   3. Anti-conservatism

b) Ideology and goals

   1. Creating a new nationalist, authoritarian state not based on tradition
   2. A new kind of regulated, multi-class national economic structure which can transform social relations, whether syndicalist, corporatist or national socialist
   3. The goal of empire
   4. An idealist, voluntarist creed, typically to realize a new modern, self-determined secular culture

c) Style and organization

   1. Aesthetic structure of meetings, symbols stressing romantic and mystical aspects
   2. Mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and the goal of a mass party militia
   3. Positive view and use of violence
   4. Extreme stress on the masculine principle
   5. Exaltation of youth
   6. Authoritarian, charismatic personal style of command[37][38][39]

I would say the best example of fascism would be Italy under the mouse man, though I guess the most famous example is Nazi Germany.

(this was more on the order of a bump, since anyone could look up the wiki definition)

-XT

GIGObuster · January 23, 2011, 4:42am

I go for the definition in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

As for current examples, I have to say this remains a very controversial subject, even at best one could only be half right by applying Fascism to Islamic political thought or current nations.

Islam should NOT be identified with fascism—but not because it is inherently a peaceful ideology. Rather, the term “Islamic fascism” or “Islamofascism” should be avoided because it’s simply another way to let Islam off the hook.

Consider: “Fascism” is a political ideology commonly said to contain the following elements: 1) extreme nationalism and/or racialism; 2) dictatorial (usually charismatic) leadership; 3) socioeconomic regimentation of some kind; 4) forcible oppression of opposition; and 5) the privileging the collective over the individual. Sometimes other characteristics, such as 6) extreme militarization of society and 7) a sense of victimization, are added.1

Does this paradigm fit with the ideology of Islamic terrorists? That ideology has four major aspects: 1) a starting point of victim-hood, especially vis-à-vis the West and Christianity; 2) an intermediate goal of re-pietizing Islamic society via imposition of “true” shari`ah (Islamic law); 3) a long-term goal of re-creating the early Islamic ummah (community) under a new caliphate, which would eventually encompass the entire planet; and 4) the preferred methodology to achieve these goals of jihad. Put up against the characteristics of fascism, Islamic-based fundamentalist ideology seems obviously to share the emphasis on the group (the ummah) and a clear sense of being victimized. Also, since a caliphate, historically, has been essentially an Islamic monarchy, the dictatorial aspect should be included as common; likewise for repression of opposition, since pre-modern Islamic regimes (and, indeed, most modern ones) have not been known for their political tolerance. The other three elements of fascism—extreme nationalism or ideas of racial superiority, socioeconomic regimentation and extreme militarization—really are not prominent themes in Islamic political thought and praxis, today or in the past. So, definitionally, while “Islamic fascism” at first glance appears appropriate, upon more careful consideration its descriptive value is nominal at best.

A second point is that the term reinforces the questionable tendency of us in the West, and especially in the U.S., to see every new global threat as a reprise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Perhaps this is because World War II was the last war that all Americans agreed was truly legitimate, for every war since then—Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq both times (albeit much less so the first time)—has had its critics. Whatever the reason, wouldn’t it be more useful to the conduct of, and debate about, the undeniable global problem of Islamic-based terrorism if we analyzed the issue on its own terms? The differences between Nazi Fascism and Islamic-based terrorism are myriad, starting with the fact that the former was a state ideology and the latter is not (at least not yet). And whatever one wishes to say about Usama bin Ladin and his ilk, they are not devotees of racial purity. Religious purity, to be sure—but that calls for a different response.

Simplicio · January 23, 2011, 7:25am

Yea, I don’t really see it. Even very extreme followers of Islam don’t appear to be particularly nationalistic or racist. Rather the opposite in fact, they tend to emphasize the trans-national character of Islam. So you have the same jyhadists happily traveling to fight in Somalia, Pakistan, Chechnya, Iraq and Albania. So long as one side is Muslim, they don’t seem to much mind what nation they’re part of or ethnic group they belong to.

And even in the most theocratic or authoritarian Islamic countries, the governments don’t seem to put the same emphasis on rigid heirarchies that Facist countries did. Its hard to see Hitler or Mussolini putting up with the various competing and opaque power-structures of religious councils and secular assemblies the Supreme Leader puts up with in Iran.

The closest thing to a facist country in the Muslim world was the relatively secular Iraqi gov’t under Saddam.

BrainGlutton · January 23, 2011, 1:01pm

Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell, is a good place to start. Or, this review of it.

Or, this: “Which Civilisation?” by Michael Lind, Prospect, 10/25/01:

Each of these schemas captures aspects of reality. But an alternative that deserves consideration is one that defines “civilisations” in terms, not of technological development or culture, but of world view. This approach gives us fewer civilisations than those listed by Huntington – but more than the single end-stage civilisation proposed by Fukuyama. From this perspective, the most important civilisational divide – one that seems even more important after the events of 11th September – may be the one between supernatural civilisations and secular civilisations. The divide is roughly, but not completely, correlated with the divide between pre-modern agrarian societies and industrial societies. Of the supernatural civilisations, the most significant have been the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the Indic (Hinduism and Buddhism). The two major Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, conquered most of the world’s territory and people, including south Asia and the Americas. Only China and Japan, among the major non-western nations, escaped Muslim or Christian rule. Today Muslim theocracies like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the most extreme examples of societies based on supernatural religion.

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

In these terms, “Islamofascism” is an oxymoron because radical Islam derives from a very different, and older, tradition from fascism.

Ryan_Liam · January 23, 2011, 1:05pm

Islamism in terms of structure has much more similarities with Communist International than Facists.

Paul_in_Qatar · January 23, 2011, 1:10pm

My first thought is that if Fascism is both anti-Liberal and anti-Conservative, then modern radical Islamic thought would not count. At first it seems that OBl et. al. are quite conservative. But is that really so?

After all, they hark back to a mythical past. They are looking to overthrow the present to reestablish a past that never was.

While it is true Islamofascism springs from a different seed than euro-Fascism, it seems like much the same bloom.

BrainGlutton · January 23, 2011, 1:16pm

“To reestablish a past that never was” is no goal of fascism and never was; it’s all about the New Order.

BrainGlutton · January 23, 2011, 1:22pm

N.B.: Franco was no fascist (though he had fascists – Falangists – among his supporters). He was all about the past. “A cop, not an artist.”

Paul_in_Qatar · January 23, 2011, 2:17pm

Forgive me, but did not Mussolini want a New Roman Empire? Did not Hitler call for the restoration of some sort of racial Valhalla? White Nationalists in the same way. It would seem the desire for a Cloud Coo-Cooland is a common trait of Fascists.

OBL does not want to return to some time in the past. He desires a fantasy version of that past.

orcenio · January 23, 2011, 2:18pm

Puritanism (not Fascism) is the first ideology tht pops into my mind when I think of modern Islamic political thought. I don’t know why people don’t draw that easy parallel, it practically draws itself.

BrainGlutton · January 23, 2011, 3:10pm

Phrases. Fascism invokes the past, sometimes, in service to its element of nationalism and the enduring-through-the-centuries “race-soul,” but it is a 20th-Century phenomenon, intoxicated with the potential of “science” and technology and the Art Deco esthetic (or more so – see Raygun Gothic), and it is really all about seizing hold of The Future by the throat.

“Cloud Cuckooland” is not a name for the Golden Age of the Past; it carries rather the reverse connotation.

What he wants is a united Islamic Caliphate, like in the Middle Ages. The Islamic narrative of history is rather different from the Western. But, the point of that is for Dar-al-Islam to become the modern world’s newest superpower.

Paul_in_Qatar · January 23, 2011, 4:17pm

Dangnabit, I was just talking about this with some Leftist friends over dinner. One insisted that Fascism in a modernizing mass movement. Now your telling me OBL wants to modernize. (But of course he does not seem to advocate a Maoist “party of the masses,” preferring Lenin’s “party of the vanguard” model. )

Ryan_Liam · January 23, 2011, 9:42pm

Slight hijack: BrainGlutton that link was quite good, it’s a good view to acertain that Islamists may very well be looking for another modern day Byzantine to bring down.

Capitaine_Zombie · January 23, 2011, 9:47pm

No, they’re more like late nineteenth early twentieth centuries anarchists.

Simplicio · January 23, 2011, 10:08pm

Yea, I think thats the best historical analog for Al-Queda type islamic terrorists. Loosely allied multinational group unified by an ideology, trying to advance their agenda by isolated violent acts that do impressive amounts of damage, but don’t seem to do much to actually advance their cause.

Also, like the anarchists, its kinda hard to articulate what exactly Al-Queda wants and how blowing up random buildings or assasinating random politicians are actually going to advance their goals. I think both groups attract people that want some reason for big, flashy acts of violence against gov’ts, without being super-concerned with what that reason is.

Ryan_Liam · January 23, 2011, 10:26pm

Yep, because the Muslim brotherhood is exactly like that.

sqweels · January 23, 2011, 10:43pm

Can we at least dispense with the notion that fascism if left-wing in that it’s all about government control of business?

BrainGlutton · January 24, 2011, 1:52am

Actually, in fascism, that’s incidental – government will control business exactly to the extent it calculates is necessary for government’s purposes, but control of any sector is not a matter of ideological commitment. Hitler’s economic views were not essentially socialist:

Early in his political career, Adolf Hitler regarded economic issues as relatively unimportant. In 1922, Hitler proclaimed that “world history teaches us that no people has become great through its economy but that a people can very well perish thereby”, and later concluded that “the economy is something of secondary importance”.[1] Hitler and the Nazis held a very strong idealist conception of history, which held that human events are guided by small numbers of exceptional individuals following a higher ideal. They believed that all economic concerns, being purely material, were unworthy of their consideration. Hitler went as far as to blame all previous German governments since Bismarck of having “subjugated the nation to materialism” by relying more on peaceful economic development instead of expansion through war.[2]

<snip>

Hitler’s views on economics, beyond his early belief that the economy was of secondary importance, are a matter of debate. On the one hand, he proclaimed in one of his speeches that “we are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system”,[6] but he was clear to point out that his interpretation of socialism “has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism,” saying that “Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not.”[7] At a later time, Hitler said: “Socialism! That is an unfortunate word altogether… What does socialism really mean? If people have something to eat and their pleasures, then they have their socialism.”[8] In private, Hitler also said that “I absolutely insist on protecting private property… we must encourage private initiative”.[9] On yet another occasion he qualified that statement by saying that the government should have the power to regulate the use of private property for the good of the nation.[10] Hitler clearly believed that the lack of a precise economic programme was one of the Nazi Party’s strengths, saying: “The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all.”[11] While not espousing a specific economic philosophy, Hitler employed anti-semitic themes to attack economic systems in other countries, associating ethnic Jews with both communism (“Jewish Bolsheviks”) and capitalism, both of which he opposed.[12][13] Hitler also believed that individuals within a nation battled with each other for survival, and that such ruthless competition was good for the health of the nation, because it promoted “superior individuals” to higher positions in society.[14]

Paul_in_Qatar · January 24, 2011, 1:38pm

Thank you all. I still think the term has some validity.