BY JANE THORNHILL
It’s no secret to anyone that our schools don’t always do the best job at teaching history. They do their best, but the fact of the matter is that history is complicated, it’s messy, and it’s hard to talk about. At the end of the day though, history tends to repeat itself, and this is why learning about it and being able to identify patterns is important.
We often hear the phrase, “if you see something, say something.” Usually, they’re referring to things like bullying and harassment. But the world is so much bigger than high school, and we aren’t often taught to identify patterns in history and society as a whole. Today, I want to shed light on one of these patterns. One that is quite hard to define, which is probably why you’ve never learned too much about it, despite the fact that you’ve likely heard it thrown around in political discussions and history classes. I’m talking about fascism.
If you paid attention in history class, you’d know that fascism is often used to describe the dictatorships of Italy and Nazi Germany during WWII. For this reason, you’d be forgiven for thinking that fascism is a specific form of government. While not entirely untrue, what fascism really is, is a series of behaviors and ideas that can exist in individual people, small communities, large societies, political movements, and governments. Contrary to popular belief, fascist thought and behavior are not always partial to one side of the political spectrum over another. The best way to approach fascism is to look at these social trends as symptoms of a much larger disease. Just because someone has a few of them, that doesn’t automatically make them a fascist. In fact, anyone immersed in politics is going to have at least a couple of these behaviors because they are very broad. Nevertheless, the more of these behaviors and ideas a person exhibits the more likely they are to follow the footsteps of a fascist movement or rally behind a fascist politician.
In his essay, Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher, and political commentator, listed out 14 common features of fascism. Some are behaviors, some are beliefs. In order, they are:
An obsession with tradition.
Rejection of modernism.
Promoting acting without thinking.
Disagreeing with them makes you their enemy.
Fear and hatred of cultural diversity and differences in beliefs.
Appealing to social frustration and finding a social class or large group of people to be their scapegoat.
Obsessed with the idea that the enemy has some sort of huge international plot.
Their description of the enemy goes back and forth from being weak and small to be strong and oppressive. The enemy is both at the same time.
Pacifism is the same as fighting for the enemy.
An overall sense of superiority is commonly over the grounds of race, religion, ethnicity, and/or nationality, but can be elitism over anything. Feeling contempt and hatred for people outside of it. Racism and xenophobia.
People are educated to be heroes to their cause, which can mean dying for it.
Sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
Framing the movement as pitting the people against the elites - Selective populism.
Changing language and vocabulary in a way to limit critical thinking. Having their own language makes it harder to communicate with people who don’t share the same views.
These trends, as I mentioned before, can apply to people without making them a fascist. It is the culmination of these things that forms fascist thought and movements. The most infamous example of this is the Nazis. Hitler talked extensively in his speeches and writings about his idea of racial purity. He took German nationalism to an extreme degree, calling it the master Aryan race, and his enemy was the Jewish population. To the Nazis, Jews were subhuman, but at the same time, they were entirely to blame for Germany’s economic hardships at the time. He took advantage of the outrage he could stir over his twisted ideas of Jewish corruption and Aryan supremacy in order to gain popularity and power.
It is important to note, however, that Hitler is not the only fascist to have ever lived, and that fascism can look different depending on who’s leading the movement and what they believe in. Italy’s fascism during WW2 looked quite different from Hitler’s. Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy at the time, didn’t believe in a supreme master race. In fact, the minute he started to implement nazism into his ideas, his popularity declined. Whereas Hitler believed in racial purity and supremacy, Mussolini’s fascism was all about creating a cult of personality and putting himself in charge. He wanted full control, and he wanted the people of Italy to love him. In order to do this, he took advantage of whatever social grievances were going on at the time in order to rally people to the cause of putting him in power. By the time he came home from serving in WW1, communism had begun to rise in Russia, and everyone in Italy from the church, to the monarchy, to humble landowners, was terrified at the ideas of socialism and communism, and people who openly identified as being socialist were despised. Mussolini took advantage of this fear and expounded upon it in order to gain support and power, the same way Hitler did over the Jewish population in Germany.
We like to believe that if we were around back then we’d be able to identify these trends and stop Hitler or Mussolini before they came to power. But as I said before, history is complicated. After WW1, European countries struggled to rebuild. Mass unemployment in Italy and high rates of inflation in Germany destroyed their economies. When a nation, group of people
, or individual person is going through an intense period of political and/or economic stress, fascism can seem like it makes sense because it offers an easily identifiable cause to the problems and an easily understood solution. With an ongoing pandemic, climate change, and the looming threat of another world war, it is no secret that things are stressful. It’s up to us to think critically and come up with solutions to our problems that don’t involve turning on each other or putting one race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality above another.
Sources and additional information:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-racism https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
The Early Warning Signs of Fascism as described by author and historian Laurence Britt provide guidance on identifying fascism in government, rather than identifying it in people.