Nature Of Fascism Research Articles

Paaliyam, Salma's Short Story Collection: Fascism by Umberto Eco

In many countries around the world, fascism is a very large political theory. This theory, which claims to save people from suffering, has often led to the destruction of people. This theory was developed in Italy by Mussolini. But the theory itself destroyed Mussolini, who is the father of fascism. However, the theory is seen in different forms in different countries, and it is seen as a theory that is sharpened on the basis of racism and religion. Thoughts about the nature of fascism have emerged in literature. Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose depicts the characteristics of fascism in symbolic language. Fourteen characteristics are described by him. Terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and monogamy are the basis of fascism. Salma in her short story called Darkness, points out that such terrorism in India works with the dual nature of Hindu-Muslim. In her story she explains that each individual is a fascist.

Blood Brothers

Abstract In British West African and Caribbean colonies in the 1930s fascism felt urgently close to people’s lived reality. Grappling with the nature of fascism, by comparing it with their lived reality under colonialism, became a site of critical intellectual debate. Yet genealogies of ideas about fascism have overwhelmingly tended to historicise and theorise fascism’s intellectual history from Europe. Histories that include arguments about fascism by colonised people nevertheless leave the impression that these debates occurred primarily among a few intellectuals living in metropolitan spaces, rather than in the colonies themselves. By mining newspapers as sites of intellectual debate, this article shows that questions about the relationship between colonialism and fascism encompassed broad plebeian and intellectual participants in a range of spaces. Their debate revises our intellectual genealogy of fascism by confirming that anti-colonialism was foundational to anti-fascism. It also revises our understanding of fascism. The embodied knowledge articulated by colonised peoples helps decipher fascism as excess by reconfiguring the very relationship between fascism and other political ideologies from one of polarities to one of proximity. When fascism is viewed from the perspective of colonised peoples, the base and root from which its excess springs comes into sharper relief

Fascism at Future's End

This essay provides a critical review of Shane Burley's Fascism Today. Studies of fascism, it argues, are always necessarily an inquiry into phenomenologies of historical time and a reflection on historiographical method. Engaging with Burley's account of contemporary fascist movements, this essay aims to identify the effects of a lacuna that underwrites approaches to fascism that, following Roger Griffin's The Nature of Fascism (1991), prioritize the ideological and metapolitical over materialist engagements with political, economic, and ecological processes. Situating contemporary fascist movements within the twin forces of emerging ecological catastrophe and ongoing economic contraction, this essay argues that contemporary fascisms are best understood as racist technologies for living in a world without a future.

Ю.А. ЖДАНОВ О СУЩНОСТНОЙ ПРИРОДЕ ФАШИЗМА

Ю.А. ЖДАНОВ О СУЩНОСТНОЙ ПРИРОДЕ ФАШИЗМА

The God That Won: Eugen Kogon and the Origins of Cold War Liberalism

Eugen Kogon (1903–87) was one of the most important German intellectuals of the late 1940s. His writings on the concentration camps and on the nature of fascism were crucial to West Germany’s fledgling transition from dictatorship to democracy. Previous scholars of Kogon have focused on his leftist Catholicism, which differentiated him from the mainstream. This article takes a different approach, asking instead how Kogon, a recovering fascist himself, came to have so much in common with his peers in West Germany and in the Cold War West. By 1948, he fluently spoke the new language of Cold War liberalism, pondering how human rights and liberal democracy could be saved from totalitarianism. He did not do so, the article argues, because he had decided to abandon his principles and embrace a militarized anti-Communist cause. Instead, he transitioned to Cold War liberalism because it provided a congenial home for a deeply Catholic thinker, committed to a carceral understanding of Europe’s fascist past and a federalist vision for its future. The analysis helps us to see how European Catholics made the Cold War their own – an important phenomenon, given that Christian Democrats held power almost everywhere on the continent that was not controlled by Communists. The analysis reveals a different portrait of Cold War liberalism than we usually see: less a smokescreen for American interests, and more a vessel for emancipatory projects and ideals that was strategically employed by diverse actors across the globe.

The Truth of Modern Society? Critical Theory and Fascism

The article discusses the contributions of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm) to a theory of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, after the Institute for Social Research had moved to the United States. The discussion concentrates on the economic and psychoanalytic aspects and concludes that Critical Theory remained too close to traditional Marxism to generate more profound insights into the nature of fascism, especially with regard to its political features.

Decentering Comparative Fascist Studies

This article challenges a tendency that grew up in fascist studies in the 1930s to treat Fascism and Nazism as the only authentic expressions of fascism, and to evaluate and understand all other manifestations of the generic force as more or less derivative of them and hence of secondary importance when understanding ‘the nature of fascism’ as an ideology. This has created an artificial location of each fascism as being either at the core or periphery of the phenomenon, and has reinforced a Eurocentrism that leads to parallel movements in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa to be neglected. It calls for wider acceptance of the realization that researching movements that did not seize autonomous power, such as the Croatian Ustasha, the Romanian Iron Guard, or the Transylvanian Saxons, can enrich understanding of aspects of Fascism and Nazism, such as the role of racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism and organized Christianity in determining the ideological contents ad fate of a particular fascism.

Fascism, liberalism and revolution

Marxist theory has always maintained that a strict continuity exists between liberalism and fascism, and has even proclaimed that there is a causal connection between the two. Therefore fascism comes to be portrayed as the ‘armed wing’ of the bourgeoisie. The Marxist thesis is weak for two reasons: first, because the connection between liberalism and fascism, though it doubtless exists, is considerably more complex, mediated and contradictory than it suggests; and second, because it axiomatically denies the revolutionary nature of fascism, which despite what Marxists claim, represents a rupture with the liberal tradition and demonstrates a relative autonomy from it. In the case of Italy, this autonomy arises from the fact that Fascism was born from the turmoil surrounding the genesis, the course and the outcome of the Great War, and was fed by fragments of philosophies and political theories radically opposed to liberalism, democracy and Marxism (though not to socialism) which arose in Europe at the turn of the 19th century. A birth in such a turbulent cultural and political climate could not give rise to an internally consistent and coherent ideology. The theoretical works of philosophers such as Giovanni Gentile encouraged liberalism to fool itself into seeing in fascism an unruly brother who could be put to good use by opposing socialism. This delusion enabled the rise to power of Mussolini. The revolutionary side to Fascism could draw on Italian populism’s latent revolutionary tradition which developed in the 50 years following unification as a transfiguration of ideological currents which contributed to the Risorgimento but which had been defeated by Cavourian liberalism. These included Mazzinianism and a particular type of radical anti-monarchism.

Gaetano Salvemini: antifascism in thought and action

Decades of historical revisionism of fascism and exploitation by the Italian press and politicians have distorted the careers of a generation of exiled Italian antifascists and devalued their work. One feature of the distortion has been to tie these democratic political activists uncritically to the communist armed Resistance and thus to dismiss the exiles after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the demise of the Italian Communist Party, and the depreciation of the founding myth of the Republic ‘born of the Resistance’. The exiles themselves are partly responsible for contributing to this misunderstanding by failing to clarify their differences with Stalinism, particularly as Carlo Rosselli moved the Paris-based antifascist organization Giustizia e Libertà to the left in the mid-1930s. Gaetano Salvemini's opposition to Rosselli's repositioning of Giustizia e Libertà illustrates merely one dimension of the diversity within the antifascist movement, and Salvemini's American career provides a useful case within the broader context of the exile experience. The exiles debated the nature of fascism, ideal strategies for defeating the regime – including their relationship with communists – and the shape of postfascist Italy. In their attempt to understand the fascist phenomenon, Salvemini and Rosselli developed the initial strains of non-Marxist, antifascist historiography, which eventually won an important place in postwar culture until recently displaced by waves of revisionism. And while opposing all forms of authoritarianism, Salvemini articulated fundamental premises of democratic antifascism that helped shape the republican constitution.

Michael Haneke and the Discontents of European Culture

At the risk of being perceived as pointlessly creating a straw man out of a very distinguished critic, I would like to preface these remarks on Michael Haneke by commenting first on Robin Wood's thoughts in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film concerning the nature of fascism and what he terms, borrowing from Norman O. Brown, the struggle of life against death, represented by an unrepressed, creative civilization versus fascism and its various institutions functioning as agents of repression. one subsection of his introductory remarks, in which he complements sectors of cultural resistance to the fascist complexion of our current society, Wood writes In Praise of Yo-Yo about the distinguished cellist whose video of his teaching sessions at the Tanglewood music festival Wood screened while writing Sexual Politics. Wood is a dedicated student of classical music, and a devotee of Bach and Mozart, whose works he counts among the greatest achievements of humanity. Wood praises not only Yo-Yo Ma's extraordinary mastery of Bach, but his apparent openness and congeniality in the Tanglewood session, an expression, in Wood's mind, of the values antithetical to fascism. Wood writes, Let him stand as the perfect paradigm of the human being in his/her creative flowering, from which all taint of the fascist mindset is totally absent.1 Was there absolutely no evidence with which Wood could anticipate Yo-Yo Ma's joining U.S. Secretary of State-then National Security Advisor-Condoleeza Rice in concert at the April 2002 National Humanities Medal Ceremony, the two playing the adagio to Brahms's Sonata for Violin and Piano in D Minor? Mrs. George Bush introduced the performance, saying that Yo-Yo Ma and Doctor Rice, would play it as a prayer for peace. Rice, of course, is a key operative in the current U.S. state murder apparatus, and a perpetrator of one of the worst genocidal wars of conquest of recent U.S. imperialism. Did Yo-Yo Ma at the time of his collaboration with Rice not understand Rice's relationship to power? Did Yo-Yo Ma, an intelligent man, not know of the ambitions of state power? Did he feign a familiar apolitical posture in order to maintain his position within dominant culture? (One might note that while there is a good argument, one offered in large measure by the Frankfurt School and Raymond Williams, that classical music is a healthy antidote to a degraded culture industry, the classics have seldom been seen as adversarial in nature, or in any sense threatening to state and private power.) I have little doubt that Robin Wood would not hesitate to analyze the Yo-Yo Ma/Rice performance and its implications. My point is that Wood's appreciation of Yo-Yo Ma, and many of his very well-reasoned appraisals of classical music generally, repeat to some degree reactionary and always popular refrains about the importance of the Western canon, and how one's mastery of this culture essentially guarantees the construction of a humane self, a better person. His praise of the famous cellist seems to take for granted Yo-Yo Ma's political worldview solely on the basis of his artistic accomplishment, and an attendant congeniality which can hardly be accepted as an index of his humanity. Certainly Michael Haneke doesn't partake of such illusions. His sense of the limits of culture, its role in simultaneously offering awareness while enforcing bourgeois notions of human interaction, is a major concern of all of his films. I have been reevaluating some of my initial analyses of his most accomplished work thus far, La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, FR/AT, 2001) (although Cache challenges seriously this evaluation); my conversation with Haneke has assisted this reevaluation and disabused me of some assumptions.2 La Pianiste may be the most important study of repression and its consequences yet portrayed in narrative fiction film, but while I initially intended this paper to revisit the specifics of Haneke's delineation of the dynamics of repression (two earlier pieces on the film sketch this issue),3 I find that my understanding of Haneke benefits from mapping the framework of his overall vision, particularly his conception of the crisis of western patriarchal capitalist society as represented by its culture. …

Fascism's Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 (review)

At first sight, Fascism's Return would seem to belong in the distinguished company of such influential collections of essays on fascism as Woolfe's The Nature of Fascism, Laqueur's Fascism: A Reader's Guide, Hagtvet et alia's Who Were the Fascists, and Mosse's International Fascism. All these managed to contain some seminal essays despite lacking a shared conceptual framework for approaching the topic. Indeed, outside the Marxist camp, it would have until recently needed a draconian act of editorial Gleichschaltung to avoid such a book becoming precisely what it was received wisdom to accuse fascism's ideology of being: a hotchpotch; a ragbag. The absence of a unifying concept of fascism which (mis)informs Golsan's book, however, is now an anachronism. Moreover, this scholarly failing is compounded by a main title and cover design which would constitute a breach of the Trade's Description Act if it applied to books.

Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 343 pp. $29.95 cloth.

What is fascism? Was there ever a fascist movement in the United States? Philip Jenkins chooses to sidestep the more theoretical debate about the nature of fascism in order to employ a definition that uses a cluster of characteristics: right-wing authoritarianism, antidemocratic sentiment, the exaltation of military and paramilitary tactics, a sort of anticapitalism, a hostility to unions, and pursuit of the integration of social groups through a single party, a totalitarian central state, and corporatist economic structure.

Between the swastika and the Cross of Lorraine: fascisms in interwar Alsace

Through the unique window of Alsace during the 1920s and 1930s, Goodfellow reveals the many faces of fascism and demonstrates its flexibility and coherence as an ideology. His study of this region, where the interplay of French, German, and Alsatian nationalities allowed a variety of fascisms to flourish, proves a framework for understanding how this ideology has mutated over time to fit changing contexts. Looking at various groups, Goodfellow shows how fascism varied according to its social support. Different fascism catered to distinct social constituents: there were elitist, peasant, lower middle-class, regionalist, and mass fascist parties, each with a sociologically appropriate ideological variant. Examining these variants and the people who embraced them, Goodfellow redefines fascism as simultaneously divided against itself and tremendously fluid. Between the Swastika and the Cross of Lorraine will appeal to those interested in French and German history and the nature of fascism and its evolution in the twentieth century.

Fascism and Antifascism: Today and Yesterday; Editors' Comment

I salute the organizers of this week's events for choosing the theme of fascism as the major topic for our deliberations. Fascism is again on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic and we all need to understand what fascism is, why it appears, and how it manifests itself. We need to understand that, contrary to what we are told by the U.S. media, fascism is not an extreme development, limited in time and place, that occurred a long time ago. Quite the contrary. Fascism is extended, generalized, and exists everywhere. But it is good that you chose the Spanish Civil War, as the proper terrain for discussing the nature of fascism and, equally important, of antifascism. We are just celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the only popular war—and the only antifascist war—that the United States has ever fought. It is quite fitting, therefore, that in the midst of this year-long celebration, we dedicate at least a few days to an understanding of the prologue to that war: the Spanish Civil War.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

BOOK REVIEW

Book reviewed in this article:Harold laski; A Life on the left. By Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, MP.Harold laski; A Political biography. By Michael Newman.A Citizens’inquiry: The Opshal Report on Northern Ireland. Edited by A. Pollak.Privatization, Public Ownership and the Regulation of Natural Monopoly. By Christopher Foster.Ethics in Public Service. Edited by Richard A. Chapman.Post‐liberalism: Studies in Political Thought. By John Gray.Democracy; The Unfinished Journey, 508 bc to 1993 ad. Edited by John Dunn.The Nature of Fascism. By Roger Griffin.Ernest Bevin. By Peter Weiler.The Power Game: The Struggle for Coal. By David Powell.Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. By David McCrone.

The existentialist dimension of fascism

Since the beginning of the 20th century political and economic upheavals in Europe have been accompanied by the development of existentialist thought. In the interwar period this trend occurred first in Germany, but it spread quickly across the European continent and gained influence in Italy, Spain and France as well as in Latin American countries. The question of the existence and the survival of the nation seemed to be mirrored in respectable philosophical concepts which in turn allowed some intellectuals to justify their adherence to right-wing ideologies. In the light of present developments in the world, and particularly in Eastern Europe, a similar phenomenon seems to be emerging and, with Marxist ideology being widely discredited, there is a tendency to regard ethnic tensions and right-wing political movements as merely a natural reaction of the masses based on the fear of the cultural and racial ‘otherness’ of the neighbour who threatens the existence of the nation and prevents it from enjoying freedom and a high standard of living.’ The purpose of this paper is not to show that existentialism equals fascism, but to investigate the links between both and explore the common social and psychological roots. It is hoped that this investigation will help define more clearly the nature of fascism and contribute to a fuller understanding of why, how and in which circumstances fascist ideas develop. The discussion about the connection between existentialism and fascism has so far been limited to Martin Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism. The whole issue is thus reduced not only to the ideas and personality of just one individual and his followers but also to one particular form of fascism, i.e. German National Socialism. The fact that existentialist thinking since World War II has been mainly associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, who had attached himself to the political left in France, has made it difficult to analyse objectively the essence of this philosophy. There is no doubt that Martin Heidegger was the most significant figure in philosophical terms; that nobody questions any longer his dubious involvement with National Socialism or that his philosophical thoughts first formulated in his famous book ‘Being and Time’, published in 1927, lent themselves to being exploited by National Socialist ideologues.2 Yet, what seemed to be missing is a fundamental, general, analysis of existentialist thinking in a clearly established historical context as opposed to a philosophical debate about the works of individuals. Without indulging in a complex philosophical discourse we can define

After Mussolini: Italian Neo-Fascism and the Nature of Fascism. By Leonard B. Weinberg. (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979. Pp. iii + 88. $6.75, paper.)

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Was Perón a Fascist? An Inquiry into the Nature of Fascism

Previous articleNext article No AccessResearch NotesWas Perón a Fascist? An Inquiry into the Nature of FascismPaul H. LewisPaul H. Lewis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 42, Number 1Feb., 1980 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2130025 Views: 84Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1979 Southern Political Science AssociationPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Kurt Weyland Assault on Democracy, 11 (Feb 2021).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108943642Jairo Lugo-Ocando The ‘changing’ face of media discourses on poverty in the age of populism and anti-globalisation: The political appeal of anti-modernity and certainty in Brazil, International Communication Gazette 82, no.11 (Oct 2019): 101–116.https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048519880749Rafael Di Tella, Juan Dubra Some elements of Peronist beliefs and tastes, Latin American Economic Review 27, no.11 (Feb 2018).https://doi.org/10.1007/s40503-017-0046-5Federico Finchelstein Populism and Dictatorship, (Sep 2016): 229–241.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43763-1_19 Vladimir Tikhonov ‘Pak Geun Hye Style’: Societal Fascism and Liberal Democracy as a Political System, Economy and Society null, no.101101 (Mar 2014): 12–26.https://doi.org/10.18207/criso.2014..101.12

Patterns of neo‐fascist violence in Italian politics

This paper explores the characteristics and meaning of Fascist violence in Italy during the two major crisis periods that appear to have stimulated it. The pattern of Fascist attacks during the post‐World War I era is compared to acts of Neo‐Fascist violence from the late 1960s through the early 1970s. Substantial differences are disclosed with respect to the targets the Fascists chose to assault in the two eras. Much of the initial wave of Fascist violence was directed against peasants, workers, and the employment‐related organizations that sought to act on their behalf. Major targets of Neo‐Fascist violence, on the other hand, have been university and secondary school students: groups that went totally unscathed in the dopoguèrra. The differences and similarities between the two waves of Fascist violence are then used as evidence to speculate about the nature of fascism in Italy.

Women under Italian Fascism

Perhaps because the subject seemed so obvious, there has been little work done on women under fascism. This omission is unfortunate not only because Fascist policy was more complicated than the general impression of it but also because it offered an interesting example of the interaction between propaganda and reality in an authoritarian society. Women played an important role in several major propaganda campaigns of fascism, such as the ruralization policy and the battle to increase the birth rate. Concern for the role of women was at the heart of the conservative and stabilizing nature of fascism and, in so far as it meant the subjugation of the private lives of citizens to the demands of the State, policy towards women reflected the totalitarian and imperialistic side of fascism as well.