CHAPTER 7 FASCISM
PREVIEW The term ‘fascism’ derives from the Italian word fasces , meaning a bundle of rods with an axe-blade protruding that signified the authority of magistrates in Imperial Rome. By the 1890s, the word fascia was being used in Italy to refer to a political group or band, usually of revolutionary socialists. It was not until Mussolini employed the term to describe the paramilitary armed squads he formed
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Historical overview
Core themes
Types of fascism
The future of fascism 166 Questions for discussion 168 Further reading 168
during and after World War I that fascismo acquired a clearly ideological meaning. The defining themeof fascism is the idea of anorganically unifiednational community, embodied in a belief in ‘strength through unity’. The individual, in a literal sense, is nothing; individual identity must be entirely absorbed into the community or social group. The fascist ideal is that of the ‘new man’, a hero, motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, prepared to dedicate his life to the glory of his nation or race, and to give unquestioning obedience to a supreme leader. In many ways, fascism constitutes a revolt against the ideas and values that dominated Western political thought from the French Revolution onwards; in the words of the Italian fascists’ slogan: ‘1789 is Dead’. Values such as rationalism, progress, freedom and equality were thus overturned in the name of struggle, leadership, power, heroism and war. Fascism therefore has a strong ‘anti-character’: it is anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti- conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, anti-communist and so on. Fascism has nevertheless been a complex historical phenomenon, encompassing, many argue, two distinct traditions. Italian fascism was essentially an extreme form of statism that was based on absolute loyalty towards a ‘totalitarian’ state. In contrast, German fascism, or Nazism, was founded on racial theories, which portrayed the Aryan people as a ‘master race’ and advanced a virulent form of anti- Semitism. Although these traditions are most clearly associated with the interwar period, they have sometimes re-emerged since 1945 in the form of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism.
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