Threat Of Fascism Research Articles

The ‘fascist threat’ in Berlusconi’s Italy

ABSTRACT It is still frequently the case today that the Italian political media use the term ‘fascist’ as an epithet aimed at opponents who do not proclaim themselves to be such in order to discredit them in the eyes of democratic public opinion, a usage with a long history in the Italian Republic. In recent times the alarm over an imminent fascist threat was reiterated with regard to Silvio Berlusconi’s government, which in the years between the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century offers a paradigmatic case. Following the collapse of the First Republic, the profound transformation of the political framework and Berlusconi’s entry onto the scene, the category of fascism was in fact revived in an attempt to delegitimize a right-wing coalition that in turn disavowed the values of anti-fascism. By examining how the political media debates of the period between the birth of Forza Italia and the fall of the last Berlusconi government, the aim of this article is to highlight these tendencies to use the past and bend it to current needs with effects that are still visible in the current situation of political communications.

Minnediplomati i grenseland. De russisk-norske patriotiske minneturene 2011–2019

This article traces the development and narrative staging in Russian media of the so-called Russian-Norwegian patriotic memory tours that took place from 2011 to 2019 to celebrate a heroic story of WWII Red Army soldiers and Norwegian partisans in Soviet intelligence service. The article concludes that the tours were initiated by Russian state and state-affiliated actors who exported military-patriotic symbols and perspectives across the border to Norway, and actively promoted several intertwined narratives; about joint Russian-Norwegian heroic war history; about historically peaceful relations in the North between Norway and Russia; and about Norway as a friendly Nato-member neighbor that rightfully honors the memory of the Soviet army and its crucial role in the victory over Nazi Germany. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, these narratives were supplemented by Russian claims about a contemporary fascist threat spreading from Ukraine and the Baltics. The statements emphasized the acute importance of the patriotic memory tours to resist allegedly growing neo-fascism in today’s Europe. The article argues that the narrative staging of the tours must be read in the context of the Kremlin’s ongoing memory wars with former Soviet republics and Eastern bloc states and Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine since 2014.

The Missing Ingredient: How Misogyny and the Patriarchy Sabotage our Clinical Practice and Research.

Discussing massive, unrelenting trauma, especially during a global pandemic, when the threat is not only personally affecting you, but also everyone else, is not an easy thing to do. We can see the consequences of two years of being locked inside. People's trauma responses literally came flooding out. It seems that the pandemic tipped us over an abyss that is hard to comprehend. In so many countries there are protests, laws rolling back basic human rights, the threat of fascism, and actual war. There seems to be widespread governmental corruption that cannot stop the favouritism of those who have wealth, and perpetually admonish those who do not. Our world seems very unstable. Change is deeply desired. Yet, this instability is predictable. It is predictable because the systems that created the structures that "run and rule" us are fundamentally destructive and violent. In never-ending ways, the only way that change happens is by utilizing violence as the only way to achieve change. This is the legacy of patriarchy. A system that not only is ruled by one group of people but also tends to be controlled by a very specific type of person. It is a system that cultivates human cruelty, selfishness, and violence. It is a system that is managed by those who do the "best" in violence. Most of us do not work this way but are forced to live this way because of the belief that humans are innately violent, selfish, and self-serving; a myth based on the traumatic reaction of fight. It is a dissociated, relational injury that is a direct result of not having our mothers and fathers able to be mothers and fathers. It is formed in misogyny. There are ways to heal, if one can comprehend what misogyny does to human beings, and what we would be like in its absence.

Populism as African Fascism? Examining the Economic Freedom Fighters in Postapartheid South Africa

The twenty-first-century global resurgence in populism has raised academic contention over whether populism undermines or deepens democracy. This question is particularly relevant in postcolonial contexts such as South Africa. Populism can be of both the left and right. Fascism, one permutation of it, has been confined by leftist academics to right-radical nationalism. Contemporary South African populism in the form of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the country's third-largest political party, confounds neat categorization. An academic and political debate has ensued about whether the EFF presents a fascist threat to South African democracy. This article extends the scrutiny of the EFF beyond what has been undertaken thus far, to situate and analyze it in relation to economic, political, and social features of fascism, contextual and ideological conditions, and the use of rhetoric and violence.

Reproductive Rights and Fascist Threat.

Reproductive Rights and Fascist Threat.

Revisiting Marx on Race, Capitalism, and Revolution

Did Karl Marx have a theory of race and capitalism? Not exactly, but he theorized on these issues over four decades and much of what he wrote still speaks to us today. At a time of global and U.S. struggles for liberation in the face of a deeply racialized fascist threat, these writings are worth revisiting.

Building Democracy: Pluralism and Community Space in the History of the Dayton Arcade

Building DemocracyPluralism and Community Space in the History of the Dayton Arcade James Todd Uhlman (bio) In 1938, when humanity stood in the shadow of one of the past's darkest alleys, the famed historian of urban life, Lewis Mumford, contemplated the role of the city in determining the nature of civilization. In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record, more subject to the gaze of many. … Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation; then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum. … Cities arise out of man's social needs and multiply both their modes and their methods of expression. … And here, through the concentration of the intercourse in the market and the meeting place, alternative modes of living present themselves; … Mind takes form in the city; and in turn urban forms condition mind. For space, no less than time, is artfully reorganized in cities. … The dome and the spire, the open avenue and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of different physical accommodations, but of essentially different conceptions of man's destiny.1 Cities are not just collections of wood, brick, metal, and mortar, but the exoskeleton of a vast organism composed of living individuals that are born, thrive, and die within it. These people, Mumford is suggesting, shape that built [End Page 19] world.2 In turn, they are shaped by it and come to embrace the diversity, creativity, and imagination that moves civilization forward. Writing in 1938, as he was, Mumford was not just speaking with clinical detachment but with a sense of urgency produced by the Great Depression, the threat of fascism, and the impending war. He was arguing that the ongoing decline of the urban culture, upon which civilization of tolerance and understanding had been built, was a reason that the world faced these varied crises at that moment. "Today our world faces a crisis: a crisis which, if its consequences are as grave as now seems, may not be resolved for another century. If the destructive forces in civilization gain ascendancy, our new urban culture will be stricken in every part. Our cities, blasted and deserted, will be cemeteries for the dead."3 If the destructive forces louring over the world, as Mumford wrote, were allowed to destroy our cities, he suggested, it would take our civilization a hundred years to recover. In 2022, it is worthwhile to recall Mumford's warning in The Culture of Cities. Many of America's cities have aged badly over the last half century. Dayton, Ohio, is one of those cities. It is arguably also true that, as Mumford warned, the decline of America's cities has come with significant social and civic cost. In this article, I use the fate of the Dayton Arcade, the city's turn-of-the-century shopping complex, in combination with the wider history of the city itself, as a case study to explore that question. The decline of the Dayton Arcade gives us an example of what happened in the last half century and what we lost along the way. Following Mumford's lead, I will argue that the Arcade was not just a building, but the material manifestation of a democratic culture based on concrete human interactions and collective social relations. It is beyond the scope of this study to demonstrate that Mumford was correct and that the awareness of interdependence is, in fact, a key civic ingredient in a healthy democracy, although this is in fact the argument that Alexis de Tocqueville, among many others, have made.4 Nor can this study show that Mumford was right in believing that the loss of civic spaces such as the Arcade could produce the sort of dangers we now face in our democracy. What this study does undertake to [End Page 20] demonstrate is that, based on the nearly 60 oral history interviews of Daytonians taken from diverse populations within the city, many Daytonians were reminded by working at and visiting the Arcade of their interdependence with others inside their community. Furthermore, the Arcade's imperfect...

“If You Go to the Right, You Will Come to the Left”: The Paradoxes of Chilean Fascism, 1930s–1940s

The period between the two world wars was a time of the emergence and rise of fascism all over the world, including Latin America, where one of the few countries where a mass fascist movement emerged was Chile. In this article the author analyses the ideology and political praxis of Chilean National Socialism in the 1930s. The analysis is based on the Chilean National Socialist political and ideological journalism, the press, and the memoirs of the activists and their opponents. The National Socialist Party (“Creole Nazism”) was formed in Chile, proclaiming nationalism, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism, and anti-communism. It was an anti-systemic movement which rejected the values of liberal democracy, which was associated with the domination of plutocracy and imperialism. They adopted corporatism, anti-Semitism, and racism from European fascists and saw themselves as the only alternative to Marxism, which threatened the Western world. The Chilean Nazis envisioned an anti-liberal revolution, the construction of a totalitarian state. Taken to its logical conclusion, these principles made the movement a dangerous force for the ruling circles, which differed little from the left, Marxist parties, which explains the harsh repression against the “Creole Nazis”, which in turn brought them closer to the left. Chilean Nazism was characterized by its constant evolution towards the left and opposition to traditional right-wing parties, which led this movement to an alliance with the anti-fascist Popular Front, which was created precisely to counter the fascist threat in the face of National Socialism. Thus, the Nazis found themselves in the same political bloc with the communists and the socialists. This unnatural alliance with the left, the preaching of the need for a “right-wing revolution”, as well as the hostility of the traditional right, led to the collapse of the movement and its disappearance from the political arena. Despite the elimination of the movement, the ideas of a right-wing revolution, a totalitarian state, corporatism were firmly established on Chilean soil, and their most striking manifestation was the regime of A. Pinochet in the 70s of the twentieth century.

Shadows of Doubt: Thornton Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock's America at War

Abstract Before beginning his military service in the summer of 1942, Thornton Wilder collaborated with acclaimed suspense director Alfred Hitchcock to write the movie Shadow of a Doubt. Despite its simple premise regarding an all-American family endangered by a dark secret, the film reveals both men's concern with the war and the ideologies behind the aggression of the Axis Powers. This article explores how the collaboration built upon the two artists' shared sense of the uniqueness of their dramatic forms, including a similar democratic sensibility and a use of doubles to emphasize the audience's (and western civilization's) vulnerability to the appeal and threat of fascism.

«Открывается панорама подлинно новой эпохи» (советский «эксперимент» в трактовке Н. В. Устрялова)

The article examines the public and political position of an outstanding personality of the Russian emigration of the “first” wave of Nikolai Vasilyevich Ustryalov. On the basis of various sources, his attitude to key issues of state construction, formed under the influence of a radical socio-political transformation in Russia, is analyzed. The most important among them are the restoration of Russian statehood in new historical circumstances, the essence and evolution of Bolshevism, the cultural and worldview orientation of the intelligentsia, the place and role of the USSR in conditions of aggravation of international relations and the threat of fascism.

The Aestheticisation of Late Capitalist Fascism

Picking up Walter Benjamin’s analysis of German Fascism as an aestheticisation of politics, the article develops the concept of late capitalist fascism for which aesthetics plays an important role. Today fascism is not primarily a political force but a cultural phenomenon that circulates as language, emblems and objects. Because of its history fascism does not dare name itself as such but fascism is fast becoming part of everyday life in a number of countries including Hungary, Italy and the United States, but also France and Denmark where the threat of fascism is used as a pretext for imposing fascist measures especially in relation to immigration and asylum policies.

АНАРХО-СИНДИКАЛИСТЫ И ИСПАНСКАЯ РЕСПУБЛИКА (1931–1936)

Many anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists in Spain generally welcomed the fall of the monarchy in April 1931, hoping that these changes would open the way for a more free development of the libertarian trade union movement and for anarchist agitation. However, the initial calculations of those who had pinned their hopes on the republic were quickly shaken. The policy of the republican governments was diametrically opposed to the ideas of the anarcho-syndicalists, and the repression of the authorities against the strike and protest movement led to the fact that the republic began to be perceived in the libertarian environment as a hostile regime. This contributed to the strengthening of internal divisions in the anarcho-syndicalist trade union association, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), causing it to split into radical and moderate trends. The first of them, having won a victory, took a course towards the immediate accomplishment of the social revolution. The political and social regime of the Spanish Republic, in the view of the anarcho-syndicalists, was to be overthrown and replaced by the system of stateless libertarian communism, which was perceived as an alternative to the fascist threat. This article examines the stages and vicissitudes in the development of relations between the anarcho-syndicalist movement and the Spanish Republic in the period preceding the military-nationalist rebellion of July 1936, and analyzes the reasons and motives for the change in the positions of the CNT and anarchists.

Proudhon and Marx

This is a translation from French of a speech given by Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965) originally published in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie in 1966 under the title ‘Proudhon et Marx’. Gurvitch, who succeeded Émile Durkheim as chair of sociology at the Sorbonne, discusses the significance of the revolutionary socialists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) for the field of sociology. In particular, Gurvitch highlights similarities in their thought such as Proudhon’s collective force and Marx’s surplus value and their shared concern for worker self-management. He argues that their mutual antipathy towards each other was rooted in personal feelings rather than in the incompatibility of their ideas, and calls for a synthesis of their ideas which would correct their errors and inspire ‘a new collectivism, neither Marxist nor Proudhonian, but surpassing both’. Lastly, Gurvitch emphasises the recurrent threat of fascism and stresses ‘decentralised collectivism’ as the only viable alternative going forward.

Leo Panitch in full flight: on contradictions, polarizations, and socialist immortality

An elaboration on some of the issues addressed in “The growing contradictions within the Empire: An interview with Leo Panitch” by Ana Garcia, Debora Gaspar, and Filipe Mendonça, as well as on other topics, including the threat of fascism in the United States that Panitch was debating with close comrades in the last months of his life.

The cult of Russianicity: mobilising anti-fascist affect in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT This article argues that after the Russian presidential election in 2012, the Kremlin mobilised a populist, anti-fascist affect called ‘Russianicity’ that Vladimir Putin used to help legitimate his third term as president. This article also traces how this state-led effort intertwined with the consumer commodity cult known as ‘Putiniana’ which functioned as an index of changing public sentiment towards Putin. Putin’s cultivation of the ribbon of Saint George as a sign of victory against fascism during his first two terms is examined in conjunction with a Putiniana marked by an ambivalence about Russian national identity and economic prosperity. In the wake of economic decline, mass protests against Putin’s third presidency, and the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, Russian state-controlled television manufactured a fascist threat from Ukraine intended to generate fear and panic. Subsequently, Putiniana more frequently invoked the ribbon of Saint George, which Putin leveraged to position himself as a unique leader capable of dealing with the fascist menace. This development culminated in Putin’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula and consequently led to a new stage of Putiniana signifying the restoration of Russia back to geopolitical greatness.

British Labour Leader Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960). A political portrait

The article examines the biography of the famous British labour politician Anurin Bevan. The author focuses on the early years of Bevan's life associated with his trade union work in South Wales, traces the transformation of his views from the support for syndicalism in his younger years to the transition to political, parliamentary struggle after the defeat of the General strike of 1926. The author pays attention to the early years of Bevan’s life, connected with his trade union work in South Wales, traces the transformation of his views from the support of syndicalism in his early years to the backing of political, parliamentary struggle after the defeat of 1926 General strike. Much attention is paid to the 1930s, when Bevan became an active supporter of the United Front and the Popular Front against the threat of fascism, that caused his temporary exclusion from the Labour Party. As a member of the British Parliament Bevan was one of the severe critics of W. Churchill’s policy of delaying the opening of the Second Front in Europe. The article traces Bevan’s successful activities as a member of the team of Labour reformers, aimed at the creation a “welfare state” after the war. In the Attlee ministry, which was formed in 1945, Bevan took over as the Health Secretary. In that capacity he was responsible for two directions of reforms – housing and the creation of the free National Health Service. The last project came into force in 1948 and is rightly considered Bevan’s main achievement Health Secretary. In the 1950s Bevan was the main inspiration behind the left wing of the Labour Party (the Bevanites) in their struggle for the continuation of reforms and also the harsh opponent of the official Labour line on several military and international questions. The main among them were the discussions about the British Rearmament programme in 1952, the struggle against the rearmament of Western Germany which the Bevanites regarded as the resurgence of German nationalism, and also a growing debate about the threat of the H-Bomb in 1955.

“Orange Plague”: World War II and the Symbolic Politics of Pro-state Mobilization in Putin’s Russia

AbstractThis article examines the symbolic politics of three pro-state movements that emerged from the “preventive counterrevolution” launched by the Kremlin in response to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In 2005, youth movement Nashi played upon war memory at its rallies and branded the opposition “fascist”; in 2012, the Anti-Orange Committee countered opposition protests with mass gatherings at Moscow’s war commemoration sites; in 2015, Antimaidan brought thousands onto Russia’s streets to denounce US-backed regime change and alleged neo-Nazism in Kiev. I show how evocation of the enemy image, through reference to the war experience, played a key role in the symbolism of the preventive counterrevolution. Interviews with activists in these movements discussing their symbolic politics reveal an opposing victim/victor narrative based on an interplay of two World War II myths—the “Great Victory” and the “fascist threat.” Moving beyond approaches that view the Soviet and Russian World War II cult as a triumphalist narrative of the Great Victory over fascism, I conclude that its threat component is an understudied element.

Claudia Jones, the Longue Durée of McCarthyism, and the Threat of US Fascism

This article examines the ways that the Black Communist luminary Claudia Jones theorized the fascist threat in the United States in the early Cold War era. Drawing on her political thought and that of her comrades, the article begins by defining the peculiar brand of US fascism that loomed large in the minds of Black radicals who critiqued and militated against global capitalist exploitation. Then, “the longue durée of McCarthyism” is employed as an analytical framework to explicate the post-World War II “fascist-like” political formation that both preceded and exceeded Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of repression. The next section highlights Jones's analysis of the 1940 Alien Registration Act, commonly known as the Smith Act, which was the first peacetime sedition act in US history. The focus of the final section is Jones's critique of, and subjection to, the Internal Security Act of 1950, also known as the McCarran Act, which President Harry S. Truman unsuccessfully vetoed. As Jones's biographers Buzz Johnson and Carole Boyce Davies note, taken together, the Smith Act and the McCarran Act created the conditions for the persecution of thousands of progressives, launched an all-out attack on their civil rights, and laid the foundation for immigration checks, deportation, and harassment particularly aimed at Black people. Ultimately, the lives of many Black anticapitalists, including Jones, Paul Robeson, C.L.R. James, and Ferdinand Smith were fundamentally disrupted by this “strong anti-Black and anti-communist hysteria” that portended the rise of fascism in the United States.

Communism Usurping Fascism: Political Propaganda in Jean Devanny’s <em>Roll Back the Night</em> and Dymphna Cusack’s <em>Heat Wave in Berlin</em>

This essay explores two specific literary and thematic tropes apparent in Jean Devanny's Roll Back the Night (1945) and Dymphna Cusack's Heat Wave in Berlin (1961): first; depictions of the fascist victim and perpetrator that act as means of didacticism and political pontification in an Australian context; second, each author's belief that the threat of fascism would engulf Australian and/or European politics post-Second World War. While the publication of the two texts is separated by almost two decades, I argue that their similarities highlight an Australian cultural naivety promoted by geographic and socially removed Australian understanding of the Third Reich. This cultural specificity becomes apparent in Roll Back the Night and Heat Wave in Berlin through the texts' depictions of the Nazi period and the period's ensuing after-effects, drawing one-dimensional character representations of the communist victim and fascist perpetrator that serve not as means of remembrance or understanding but as Communist propaganda aimed at an Australian audience. Similarly, the cultural and geographic distancing in the two texts is further noted-however influential these stories may or may not have been-in each author's attempts to combat what they suggest is the encroaching threat of the political Right in both Australian and European contexts. It is this lack of character development, alongside each author's political tone and their similar political concerns, that will be explored in this essay.Jean Devanny and Dymphna Cusack were both, for many years, affiliated to the Realist Writers' League, collective that contained a significant minority of Australian writers [in which] the Communist Party provided an intellectual context for the production of literature at the time (Nile 189). A significant portion of their fiction, including Roll Back the Night and Heat Wave in Berlin, attempts to adhere to socialist realism prescriptions, which, as the Australian literary scholar Susan McKernan notes, can be categorized as having four goals:First, socialist realism aimed to be popular both in the sense of representing the lives and aspirations of working people and in the sense of being accessible to and entertaining for them. Second, it linked nationalism to universal concern with the struggles of humanity. Third, it presented the actual conditions of contemporary society rather than the trials of the past as the material for literature. Most important, socialist realism offered reconciliation of the two strands of literature, the concern for the life of the individual and the concern for society, by means of the theory of the typical. (31)Whether Devanny's or Cusack's writing succeeded in fulfilling all of these goals is doubtful, for these demands were to meet (McKernan 31). The intention to abide by such rules, however, exerted significant influence on the content of each publication, including depictions of the fascist perpetrator and victim. It was through these representations that the authors propagated their belief that fascism would once again take hold in Europe and/or Australia if certain cultural and political conditions were enabled.Set during the war years or in the years shortly following the war's conclusion, Roll Back the Night and Heatwave in Berlin incorporate literary specificities that the Australian scholar H. M. Green noticed in Australian literature being published around the time:Not long after the ending of the First World War, with the gradual realization that it had not been the war to end all wars, and with the depression that soon followed, change of attitude set in, which was accentuated by the arrival of the Second World War and by the growing fears of third. In the literature that arose in these conditions, self-confidence was qualified by realization that the world had become much more difficult and dangerous, and Australia was an inescapable part of it. …

Jewish Responses to Fascism and Antisemitism in Edinburgh, 1933–1945

Despite the weaknesses of domestic fascist movements, in the context of the rise of Nazi Germany and the presence of antisemitic propaganda of diverse origin Edinburgh's Jewish leaders took the threat seriously. Their response to the fascist threat was influenced by the fact that Edinburgh's Jewish community was a small, integrated, and middle-class population, without links to leftist groups or trade unions. The Edinburgh community closely followed the approach of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in relation to the development of fascism in Britain, the most significant aspect of which was a counter-propaganda initiative. Another important aspect of the response in Edinburgh was the deliberate cultivation of closer ties to the Christian churches and other elite spheres of Scottish society. Despite some unique elements, none of the responses of Edinburgh Jewry, or indeed the Board of Deputies, were particularly novel, and all borrowed heavily from established traditions of post-emancipation Jewish defensive strategies.