It's a bit light on rigor than I hoped when I saw the title. It describes 3 fascist or near-fascist states that lost in recent history: Germany, Italy, Franco's Spain. But I wanted to know if Rome under Julius Caesar would be considered fascist? Alexander of Macedon? And also non-western states as well.
IMO it is less about fascism but wars of conquests that are more likely to be doomed to fail. Maybe fascism is a requirement for desires of conquest so they are tightly related.
For conquest to succeed it must be quick and overwhelming. Otherwise it becomes a war of attrition against an enemy that has way better motivation than your army. But also, even if you have a decisive victory, it is almost impossible to stop at just one victory because the war machine will be thirsty for more and your entire economy will be dependent on it, so you have to keep going until total failure.
One difficulty is that fascism is a very modern phenomenon, in the sense that it stood out to 20C societies because they had known alternative forms of state power, whereas someone in 14C England, say, would not have known any other form of governance than the unchecked power of the State (strictly, the King) and in particular the use of force to compel behavior, which is of course the hallmark of fascism. It would be hard to recognize fascism unless you also knew what a democracy (say) or some other ruling mode was like.
> whereas someone in 14C England, say, would not have known any other form of governance than the unchecked power of the State (strictly, the King)
The king's powers were not unchecked. People had human rights by custom and law (Magna Carter, for example), parliament controlled taxation, aristocrats had a great deal of power, the Church had a lot of power.
Nowhere near democracy, but a very different system from an unchecked dictatorship.
Edit to add: this was the system from which modern democracy slowly evolved.
Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, held his position on the condition that "...if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King"
That is a pretty narrow requirement and what he wanted to do anyway.
Maybe it was required because as an Anglo-Norman himself, and his former position in England and his families former position, he needed to guarantee where his loyalties lay?
Indeed, but it's interesting that it is included in the Declaration of Arbroath asking the Pope to recognise Scotland's independence - I think it might have been to emphasise that it wasn't just about his wants but all of the Scottish aristocracy?
The use of force to compel behavior is a defining feature of any state, not just fascist ones. Political theorists from Max Weber onward have described the state as the human community that “successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” That applies equally to monarchies, democracies, empires, and totalitarian regimes.
The hallmarks of fascism include ultranationalism, mythic unity, supression of dissent, but go even further.
Instead of seeking stable control, fascism constructs an intense line of escape that it transforms into pure destruction and abolition, demonstrating a realized nihilism that goes beyond mere authoritarian management.
Fascist violence is driven by a psychological death drive—a desire not only to harm others but ultimately to destroy oneself. Under fascism, the government evolves into a suicidal state engages in a risky flirtation with its own self destruction.
Historically, this is evidenced by the Nazi rallying cry "long live death," the pivot of investments from production to pure destruction, and Hitler's 1945 order (Telegram 71) to destroy Germany's remaining infrastructure, effectively declaring that "if the war is lost, may the nation perish".
The suppression of dissent manifests as the accelerated destruction of state institutions, the severing of public assistance, and reducing the everyday presence of the federal government to masked armed agents in the streets, disappearing our neighbors and shooting civilians.
Above-and-beyons mere authoritarianksm, fascism exploits people's alienation, replacing valid grievances with a psychosis of total war and a nihilistic push toward self-destruction.
A dictionary definition is not necessarily the correct definition. Almost all dictionaries these days have a "descriptive, not prescriptive" policy - they tell you what a word is likely mean in common usage, rather than tell you how to use a word correctly.
This is an especially big problem with a badly defined word like this,
It's usually better to look at Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism". Yes, it's a set of vague aesthetic criteria, but aesthetics is a big part of Fascism and the thing that distinguishes it from other forms of totalitarianism. The aesthetics helped drive public support, which is also crucial to distinguishing Fascism from, say, feudalism: it's inherently a post-democratic politics.
Edit: I wrote this comment, clicked through, and of course Eco is the first writer referenced.
The definition you linked calls almost any dictatorship as a fascism. The article makes difference between "random dictatorship, monarchy, what have you" and "fascism specifically". That being said, even by your definition Stalins Russia did not had that much of a racial component, so it might just be one of those that fall out.
The original article also does not really fit the Socialist Russia that much. It was seeking world domination and did not minded to start a war, but that is the thing - it was concerned more with reality of winning then with appearance of strength for aesthetic purposes. It had own machismo, it had disdain to intellectualism, but both did in fact limited its capabilities.
Some of the features of Marxism Leninism may look like fascism when you step back and squint, but it's f-cked up in its own way. It's not even a far right versus far left thing. That's one of those neat symmetries that doesn't really apply.
Stalin's Russia didn't have a cult of machismo quite like Germany or Italy did, they measured themselves by industrial and intellectual might, rather than how manly they were. Yes there are quite a few similarities I'll grant you, but they didn't have that particular weakness.
fascist as in common parlance, e.g. brutal authoritarian dictators
but fascist in the original sense -- as created by mussolini -- was aggressive nationalism combined with corporatism, and a reclaiming of lost glory (revanchism)
george w bush's america is closer to classical fascism than stalin would ever be
I think this essay suffers from an attempt to define fascism so narrowly it only actually includes two countries - Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, who were both defeated by the same set of powers in the same war - while simultaneously stating that there's a specific quality of fascism - namely, an unwise focus on the signifiers of military strength rather than actual military strength - that is applicable to a bunch of other governments in other situations he classifies as near-fascist to avoid arguments over whether they are actually fascist or not.
I don't think he makes the case that an unwise focus on the signifiers rather than the reality of military strength primarily explains the defeat of either Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy in WWII. Did the Nazis and Italian fascists actually do this to a greater extent than any of the other participants of the war? Certainly every major participant in WWII had propaganda about how good its army was, including the United States and Britain ("videos" is anachronistic for the time period, but there's plenty of American WWII military propaganda that was originally a black and white filmstrip that's been digitized on YouTube). And every major participant in the war had a great deal of actual, non-fake, military strength. Fascist Italy was certainly a junior partner to the Nazis, but Nazi Germany was primarily defeated in the incredibly bloody Eastern Front, mostly by the armies of the Soviet Union expending huge amounts of blood and treasure in order to do it. It was not a trivial victory, nor I think an inevitable one.
The Soviet Union was an officially state socialist country, an ideology that saw itself as directly opposed to fascism. Particularly under Stalin, it can hardly be described as a country "willing to engage in potentially embarrassing self-study and soul-searching" - indeed Stalin's purges of large fractions of Soviet society in the 1930s, including the military, are a commonly-cited reason why the Nazis had so much success in the initial phases of the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Of course every allied power in the war was being supplied materially by the United States, which had an extremely favorable geographical position and cultural disposition to produce material goods. Maybe whichever side in the war the US supported would've won. Or maybe some third thing would've happened, WWII is one of the most well-studied conflicts in human history (and for good reason, it was a pretty important one!), there's lots of people with lots of ideas out there about how it could've gone differently than it did.
Looking beyond Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to other countries also weakens the argument. Let's say for the sake of argument that Franco's Spain counts as fascist. Then the fascists won the civil war, avoided fighting in WWII at all and thereby being destroyed like Nazi Germany was (although I think this was also not a foregone conclusion, and had more to do with the geopolitical calculus of the Allied Powers than anything Spain itself did at the time), and ended up surviving until Franco died of heart failure at the age of 82. At which point the country had a series of contentious-but-ultimately-peaceful political reforms resulting in its modern constitutional monarchy. This doesn't really sound like a narrative where a focus on the trappings rather than the reality of military ability resulted in a fascist nation fighting an aggressive war of choice and then losing! This might've just been Hitler specifically! (And it's not like that was the first time Germany did this sort of thing - was Kaiser Wilhelm II fascist? What about Otto von Bismark - the Franco-Prussian war went fairly well for Prussia and fairly badly for Napoleon III's France, actually, although maybe this is getting too far back in the past for labels like "fascist" to be useful).
If Salazar's Portugal was fascist, then doesn't the fact that it avoided aggressive war imply that fighting (and losing) aggressive wars isn't very diagnostic of fascism? If the fact that it lost its overseas colonial empire constituted a military failure of fascism, then what are we to make of the fact that so did Britain and France at roughly the same time and for the same set of reasons? Was France suffering from fascist overconfidence in its military when it failed to win the First Indochina War? Immediately after having been successfully conquered by Nazi Germany for a few years and then successfully expelling them along with the other allied powers in exactly the same war that Nazi Germany lost as thoroughly and completely as it is possible to lose a war?
Saddam Hussein's Iraq is also a poor example, because while it was a cult-of-personality dictatorship and there was definitely a great deal of the trappings of military strength rather than actual military strength - Hussein did not tolerate his subordinates bluntly telling him the actual truth on the ground - Iraq didn't actually lose his war of choice against Kuwait because of anything Kuwait did. He lost it because the United States, in its capacity as a global superpower, decided that it wasn't going to tolerate Iraq invading Kuwait and more-or-less unilaterally - and easily - destroyed Iraq's army in the First Gulf War. And of course in the Second Gulf War Iraq didn't really do anything, which is why so many people thought it was immoral - indeed, fascist! - for the US to wage another aggressive war of choice against Iraq, again more-or-less unilaterally, and again easily destroy Iraq's army, depose Saddam Hussein, set up a puppet government that tried and executed him, and basically run the country for another decade or so until the US got tired of it. I don't think this says anything about fascism or near-fascism, I think this says that the United States is World Police (you know, like that movie the South Park guys made, at the time).
I think the actual point of this essay is that the author is operating in a framework where he wants to compare his domestic political opponents to Nazi Germany - because that's a metaphorical framework that has been in play in liberal democracies since they were actually fighting WWII against the actual Nazis - and because he's a historian who focuses a lot on warfare, he wants to do this by arguing that actual fascist governments (both of them) were bad at war even though they had the trappings of being good at war. So therefore his domestic political opponents, who he calls fascists, must also be foolish blowhards who are actually weak and pathetic.
You don't write something like "Put bluntly, fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them." if you're trying to actually understand why various types of government performed the way they did in actual wars - you write this if you're actually talking about people in your liberal democracy who you don't like and are trying to insult. And you write "(mostly men)" if you're operating from a framework which treats masculinity as inherently suspect, which is a contemporary domestic-politics political signifier, rather than something that was relevant to explaining why the Soviet Union ultimately militarily defeated Nazi Germany.
they were monarchs, and leaning to the standard absolute monarchy style of leadership whenever possible.
classical Mussolini fascism is corporatism combined with nationalism and elements of communism, mostly in whatever combination The Leader thought were appropriate.
there is no way the Junker class of Prussia would let a bunch of upstart capitalists tell them how to run their empire.
>But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.”2 Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is.
It's a fun read and an interesting premise.
It's a bit light on rigor than I hoped when I saw the title. It describes 3 fascist or near-fascist states that lost in recent history: Germany, Italy, Franco's Spain. But I wanted to know if Rome under Julius Caesar would be considered fascist? Alexander of Macedon? And also non-western states as well.
IMO it is less about fascism but wars of conquests that are more likely to be doomed to fail. Maybe fascism is a requirement for desires of conquest so they are tightly related.
For conquest to succeed it must be quick and overwhelming. Otherwise it becomes a war of attrition against an enemy that has way better motivation than your army. But also, even if you have a decisive victory, it is almost impossible to stop at just one victory because the war machine will be thirsty for more and your entire economy will be dependent on it, so you have to keep going until total failure.
> It describes 3 fascist or near-fascist states that lost in recent history: Germany, Italy, Franco's Spain
Where did Franco lose? He won the civil war and his administration survived until his own death.
Franco lost? he ruled until he died and only after his death did the rest of the government decide to open.
he was, arguably, the only successful "true" fascist
One difficulty is that fascism is a very modern phenomenon, in the sense that it stood out to 20C societies because they had known alternative forms of state power, whereas someone in 14C England, say, would not have known any other form of governance than the unchecked power of the State (strictly, the King) and in particular the use of force to compel behavior, which is of course the hallmark of fascism. It would be hard to recognize fascism unless you also knew what a democracy (say) or some other ruling mode was like.
> whereas someone in 14C England, say, would not have known any other form of governance than the unchecked power of the State (strictly, the King)
The king's powers were not unchecked. People had human rights by custom and law (Magna Carter, for example), parliament controlled taxation, aristocrats had a great deal of power, the Church had a lot of power.
Nowhere near democracy, but a very different system from an unchecked dictatorship.
Edit to add: this was the system from which modern democracy slowly evolved.
Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, held his position on the condition that "...if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King"
That is a pretty narrow requirement and what he wanted to do anyway.
Maybe it was required because as an Anglo-Norman himself, and his former position in England and his families former position, he needed to guarantee where his loyalties lay?
Indeed, but it's interesting that it is included in the Declaration of Arbroath asking the Pope to recognise Scotland's independence - I think it might have been to emphasise that it wasn't just about his wants but all of the Scottish aristocracy?
I have no idea, but it seems to be an interesting question. I am going to ask a historian about this.
I did a quick search and i had no idea that Robert the Bruce was excommunicated twice and had both excommunications lifted!
One of my favourite Robert the Bruce stories is about all the adventures his heart had once he died and it was removed from his body:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Teba
maybe to 16th century absolute rulers. there is a reason "absolutism" is a separate term from "king"
but before then a kings power was regularly checked, both by custom, law, and political realities -- e.g. your vassals account for most of your army.
The use of force to compel behavior is a defining feature of any state, not just fascist ones. Political theorists from Max Weber onward have described the state as the human community that “successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” That applies equally to monarchies, democracies, empires, and totalitarian regimes.
The hallmarks of fascism include ultranationalism, mythic unity, supression of dissent, but go even further.
Instead of seeking stable control, fascism constructs an intense line of escape that it transforms into pure destruction and abolition, demonstrating a realized nihilism that goes beyond mere authoritarian management.
Fascist violence is driven by a psychological death drive—a desire not only to harm others but ultimately to destroy oneself. Under fascism, the government evolves into a suicidal state engages in a risky flirtation with its own self destruction.
Historically, this is evidenced by the Nazi rallying cry "long live death," the pivot of investments from production to pure destruction, and Hitler's 1945 order (Telegram 71) to destroy Germany's remaining infrastructure, effectively declaring that "if the war is lost, may the nation perish".
The suppression of dissent manifests as the accelerated destruction of state institutions, the severing of public assistance, and reducing the everyday presence of the federal government to masked armed agents in the streets, disappearing our neighbors and shooting civilians.
Above-and-beyons mere authoritarianksm, fascism exploits people's alienation, replacing valid grievances with a psychosis of total war and a nihilistic push toward self-destruction.
According to the dictionary definition of fascism (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fascism), Stalin's Russia was also "fascist", and won many wars, invading and occupying free democracies (Poland) for years.
A dictionary definition is not necessarily the correct definition. Almost all dictionaries these days have a "descriptive, not prescriptive" policy - they tell you what a word is likely mean in common usage, rather than tell you how to use a word correctly.
This is an especially big problem with a badly defined word like this,
It's usually better to look at Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism". Yes, it's a set of vague aesthetic criteria, but aesthetics is a big part of Fascism and the thing that distinguishes it from other forms of totalitarianism. The aesthetics helped drive public support, which is also crucial to distinguishing Fascism from, say, feudalism: it's inherently a post-democratic politics.
Edit: I wrote this comment, clicked through, and of course Eco is the first writer referenced.
Far right totalitarianism and far left totalitarianism have a lot in common.
The definition you linked calls almost any dictatorship as a fascism. The article makes difference between "random dictatorship, monarchy, what have you" and "fascism specifically". That being said, even by your definition Stalins Russia did not had that much of a racial component, so it might just be one of those that fall out.
The original article also does not really fit the Socialist Russia that much. It was seeking world domination and did not minded to start a war, but that is the thing - it was concerned more with reality of winning then with appearance of strength for aesthetic purposes. It had own machismo, it had disdain to intellectualism, but both did in fact limited its capabilities.
Some of the features of Marxism Leninism may look like fascism when you step back and squint, but it's f-cked up in its own way. It's not even a far right versus far left thing. That's one of those neat symmetries that doesn't really apply.
The soviet empire collapsed, even in the same lifetimes of many who saw its rise.
Lasted longer than the Nazi empire, I'll admit, but both were weak
Stalin's Russia didn't have a cult of machismo quite like Germany or Italy did, they measured themselves by industrial and intellectual might, rather than how manly they were. Yes there are quite a few similarities I'll grant you, but they didn't have that particular weakness.
fascist as in common parlance, e.g. brutal authoritarian dictators
but fascist in the original sense -- as created by mussolini -- was aggressive nationalism combined with corporatism, and a reclaiming of lost glory (revanchism)
george w bush's america is closer to classical fascism than stalin would ever be
Fascism was initially a cultural movement that was an attack on the ideals of the enlightenment.
I think this essay suffers from an attempt to define fascism so narrowly it only actually includes two countries - Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, who were both defeated by the same set of powers in the same war - while simultaneously stating that there's a specific quality of fascism - namely, an unwise focus on the signifiers of military strength rather than actual military strength - that is applicable to a bunch of other governments in other situations he classifies as near-fascist to avoid arguments over whether they are actually fascist or not.
I don't think he makes the case that an unwise focus on the signifiers rather than the reality of military strength primarily explains the defeat of either Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy in WWII. Did the Nazis and Italian fascists actually do this to a greater extent than any of the other participants of the war? Certainly every major participant in WWII had propaganda about how good its army was, including the United States and Britain ("videos" is anachronistic for the time period, but there's plenty of American WWII military propaganda that was originally a black and white filmstrip that's been digitized on YouTube). And every major participant in the war had a great deal of actual, non-fake, military strength. Fascist Italy was certainly a junior partner to the Nazis, but Nazi Germany was primarily defeated in the incredibly bloody Eastern Front, mostly by the armies of the Soviet Union expending huge amounts of blood and treasure in order to do it. It was not a trivial victory, nor I think an inevitable one.
The Soviet Union was an officially state socialist country, an ideology that saw itself as directly opposed to fascism. Particularly under Stalin, it can hardly be described as a country "willing to engage in potentially embarrassing self-study and soul-searching" - indeed Stalin's purges of large fractions of Soviet society in the 1930s, including the military, are a commonly-cited reason why the Nazis had so much success in the initial phases of the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Of course every allied power in the war was being supplied materially by the United States, which had an extremely favorable geographical position and cultural disposition to produce material goods. Maybe whichever side in the war the US supported would've won. Or maybe some third thing would've happened, WWII is one of the most well-studied conflicts in human history (and for good reason, it was a pretty important one!), there's lots of people with lots of ideas out there about how it could've gone differently than it did.
Looking beyond Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to other countries also weakens the argument. Let's say for the sake of argument that Franco's Spain counts as fascist. Then the fascists won the civil war, avoided fighting in WWII at all and thereby being destroyed like Nazi Germany was (although I think this was also not a foregone conclusion, and had more to do with the geopolitical calculus of the Allied Powers than anything Spain itself did at the time), and ended up surviving until Franco died of heart failure at the age of 82. At which point the country had a series of contentious-but-ultimately-peaceful political reforms resulting in its modern constitutional monarchy. This doesn't really sound like a narrative where a focus on the trappings rather than the reality of military ability resulted in a fascist nation fighting an aggressive war of choice and then losing! This might've just been Hitler specifically! (And it's not like that was the first time Germany did this sort of thing - was Kaiser Wilhelm II fascist? What about Otto von Bismark - the Franco-Prussian war went fairly well for Prussia and fairly badly for Napoleon III's France, actually, although maybe this is getting too far back in the past for labels like "fascist" to be useful).
If Salazar's Portugal was fascist, then doesn't the fact that it avoided aggressive war imply that fighting (and losing) aggressive wars isn't very diagnostic of fascism? If the fact that it lost its overseas colonial empire constituted a military failure of fascism, then what are we to make of the fact that so did Britain and France at roughly the same time and for the same set of reasons? Was France suffering from fascist overconfidence in its military when it failed to win the First Indochina War? Immediately after having been successfully conquered by Nazi Germany for a few years and then successfully expelling them along with the other allied powers in exactly the same war that Nazi Germany lost as thoroughly and completely as it is possible to lose a war?
Saddam Hussein's Iraq is also a poor example, because while it was a cult-of-personality dictatorship and there was definitely a great deal of the trappings of military strength rather than actual military strength - Hussein did not tolerate his subordinates bluntly telling him the actual truth on the ground - Iraq didn't actually lose his war of choice against Kuwait because of anything Kuwait did. He lost it because the United States, in its capacity as a global superpower, decided that it wasn't going to tolerate Iraq invading Kuwait and more-or-less unilaterally - and easily - destroyed Iraq's army in the First Gulf War. And of course in the Second Gulf War Iraq didn't really do anything, which is why so many people thought it was immoral - indeed, fascist! - for the US to wage another aggressive war of choice against Iraq, again more-or-less unilaterally, and again easily destroy Iraq's army, depose Saddam Hussein, set up a puppet government that tried and executed him, and basically run the country for another decade or so until the US got tired of it. I don't think this says anything about fascism or near-fascism, I think this says that the United States is World Police (you know, like that movie the South Park guys made, at the time).
I think the actual point of this essay is that the author is operating in a framework where he wants to compare his domestic political opponents to Nazi Germany - because that's a metaphorical framework that has been in play in liberal democracies since they were actually fighting WWII against the actual Nazis - and because he's a historian who focuses a lot on warfare, he wants to do this by arguing that actual fascist governments (both of them) were bad at war even though they had the trappings of being good at war. So therefore his domestic political opponents, who he calls fascists, must also be foolish blowhards who are actually weak and pathetic.
You don't write something like "Put bluntly, fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them." if you're trying to actually understand why various types of government performed the way they did in actual wars - you write this if you're actually talking about people in your liberal democracy who you don't like and are trying to insult. And you write "(mostly men)" if you're operating from a framework which treats masculinity as inherently suspect, which is a contemporary domestic-politics political signifier, rather than something that was relevant to explaining why the Soviet Union ultimately militarily defeated Nazi Germany.
One thing in your essay I'd like to point out, that in no common definition Friedrich - Wilhelm II or Otto von Bismarck can be defined as fascist.
they were monarchs, and leaning to the standard absolute monarchy style of leadership whenever possible.
classical Mussolini fascism is corporatism combined with nationalism and elements of communism, mostly in whatever combination The Leader thought were appropriate.
there is no way the Junker class of Prussia would let a bunch of upstart capitalists tell them how to run their empire.
[dead]
According to the author it is toxic masculinity that was the root cause of fascism. Just if someone likes to be spared the read.
Foul! No such thing was claimed.
>But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.”2 Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is.
Drink your milk.