- What is fascism?
- Characteristics of fascism
- Origin of fascism
- Ideology of fascism
- Fascism and Nazism
- Fascism today
We explain what fascism is, its origin, ideology, its relationship with Nazism and other characteristics. Also, fascism today.
What is fascism?
Fascism was a mass movement and a political ideology that dominated different parts of the Europe of the first half of the 20th century, especially in the context prior to the WWII. In addition, it had echoes and later repercussions in other geographies of the planet.
Fascism promoted a Condition authoritarian and totalitarian, undemocratic and militaristic, strongly anchored in the notions of homeland and race, which resulted in the oppression and persecution of minorities. The regimes of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), in Italy and Germany respectively, are the most common and typical examples of the State. fascist.
The exact nature and precise definition of fascism are often debated in the Political Sciences. This is due in part to the absence of a tradition fascist politics (since it was born in the twentieth century), and also because the different fascist regimes that have existed have been very unorthodox in their methods and demonstrations, united only by a violent and extremist character.
The variety of these regimes often makes it difficult to locate a common least common trait of fascism, which allows it to be confused with the dictatorship military, for example, or that there are those who affirm that it belonged to one or another socio-economic orientation.
Traditionally, however, fascism has been seen as an anti-liberal, far-right manifestation that mobilizes the society whole against a real or imaginary external enemy, establishing a kind of “military citizenship”. However, the method and speech The specifics in which this is carried out can vary greatly.
Characteristics of fascism
Fascism usually has the following characteristics:
- It is a nationalist and militarist ideological or political movement, with a radical, violent and confrontational spirit, which exalts the notions of homeland and / or race, to the detriment of minorities, foreigners and all those considered different.
- Almost always appeals to notions of purity, combat and victory, also proclaiming himself as heir to a glorious past to recover.
- It encourages the organization of irregular or parallel armed forces, with which to persecute their adversaries and subject society to a state of intimidation.
- It proposes a model of a single, totalitarian and authoritarian party state, built around the supposed infallibility of a Leader charismatic, who is worshiped personality.
- Ideologically, it is often proposed as a "third way" between right and left, which generally means arbitrarily applying practices associated with one or another trend.
Origin of fascism
The origins of fascism date back to Italy at the end of the 19th century, in which there were various nationalist and revolutionary movements of diverse ideology, called fascio (term translatable by do, in the sense of the "bundle of lictors", a symbol of republican authority in Ancient Rome, an instrument called fasces In latin).
Benito Mussolini directed the Fascio from Milan. Under the command of this charismatic leader, all these movements were united into a single national movement in 1915. In 1919, after the end of the First World War, they were refounded as Fasci italiani di combattimento ("Italian combat fascios").
This group carried out a violent and street fight against strikers, leftists and other political and social groups considered by them as enemies of the country. One of his impulses was the fear that it would be unleashed in the nations of Europe a proletarian revolution like the one that occurred in 1918 in Russia Tsarist, and that spawned Communist Russia.
As Mussolini's movement gained more political prominence, he organized for the seizure of the can under the name of Partito Nazionale Fascista ("National Fascist Party"). Its militants formed a paramilitary force called the Voluntary Militia for National Security, also known as canicie nere (“Black shirts”), dedicated to actions of assault, murder and intimidation of their political opponents.
His power was so great that in 1922 Mussolini forced the King of Italy himself, Victor Emmanuel III, to hand him de facto power, after his famous march on Rome. The era of fascism in Italy had begun. During this emergence, various organizations similar ones imitated the aesthetics and the fascist organization in almost all the European countries and in several American nations.
Thus arose:
- The brown shirtsSturmabteilung or SA) of Adolf Hitler in Germany, organizing around his own charismatic leader and strong racist and anti-Semitic sentiment.
- The blue shirts (known as the Spanish Phalanx) of José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Spain, militants of the ultra-Catholic and anti-communist cause.
Other variants also emerged in England, Canada, France, Romania, China, Hungary, Brazil, Mexico or the United States, some of which also managed to seize power.
The triumph of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and Francoism in Spain (immersed in the tragic Spanish Civil War) created a radical political axis in interwar Europe, whose military and later territorial expansion triggered World War II.
Ideology of fascism
In a strict sense, fascism is neither of the right nor of the left, but offers itself as a third way, equally opposed to the democracy liberal capitalist, like the labor movements and communists.
However, the difficulty in ideologically classifying fascism usually lies in the fact that it put into practice ideas associated with different positions on the ideological spectrum: the nationalization and regulation of the economy by a strong and implacable State, the exaltation of traditional values and the purity of the national identity, the use of slave or semi-slave labor for the benefit of cooperating private companies, etc.
For some authors, fascism is the last phase of the capitalism more ruthless, capable of totally stripping the rights of marginal sectors of the population and so exploit them economically until death. Others consider it a movement with socialist roots, prone to the nationalization of society and whose anti-Marxism would not prevent it from assuming certain ideas shared with Leninism.
In any case, it is simpler to define fascism ideologically by what it opposes. Regimes of this type are often illiberal, anti-Marxist, anti-communist, anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, and anti-capitalist. This is complemented by varying degrees of racism, chauvinism, nationalism, agrarianism and religiosity.
Fascism and Nazism
Italian fascism and German Nazism were sister movements, arising out of the brutal economic crisis of 1929 (the “Great Depression”) and the dissatisfaction it unleashed in their populationsbattered by the recent First World War and shaken by the leadership of his future dictators, Benito Mussolini and Adolfo Hitler.
In both cases they achieved political power and reorganized society as they pleased, militarizing the citizenry and undermining the rights of minorities, especially Jews. In fascist rhetoric, especially in Germany, these minorities were considered "inferior races" destined for extermination or destruction. slavery, to grant the strongest peoples sufficient "living space" (Lebensraum, in Hitler's own words) to grow and flourish.
These ideas, a kind of social distortion of Darwinism, led them to conquer the nations of Eastern Europe and to build concentration and extermination camps. Together they fought in World War II against the powers allies of France, England and the United States, such as the newborn Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Neither fascism nor Nazism survived the war.The former came under pressure from the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, when the Italian king himself ordered Mussolini's arrest, as a strategy to sign an armistice with the allied forces. This forced Nazi Germany to invade Italy in a rescue operation, creating the Italian Social Republic in the north of the country, a puppet state of the Nazis.
In 1945, this fascist republic was invaded by the allies, and Mussolini tried to escape with his lover Clara Petacci and other hierarchs of his regime, across the border with Switzerland. But on the way a patrol of Italian communist partisans recognized them and stopped them. They were taken to Milan, where they were publicly executed.
For its part, the Nazi regime failed in its campaign to annex the territories of the Soviet Union, and also in its absurd plan to summon the western allied nations under its anti-communist banner.
In April 1945 the Red Army entered Berlin, where Hitler took refuge in his bunker near the Reich Chancellery. There the dictator and his lover Eva Braun committed suicide and their bodies were cremated by his followers, hours before the defeat and total surrender of Germany.
Fascism today
The revival of fascism is often spoken of, under the name of neo-fascism or neo-Nazism. Several European movements that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s adhered to this ideology, exhibiting an aesthetic retro and a tendency towards street violence, as well as nationalism racist. However, they did not have greater relevance in the political panorama of their countries.
At the beginning of the 21st century, different far-right parties emerged in the central and eastern European nations, such as Austria, France and Hungary. In some cases they managed to conquer power through elections.
However, none of them really represented a revival of fascist procedures, but rather much more moderate versions, which nevertheless share traits of the same ultra-nationalist and xenophobic sentiment.