Defining fascism
Fascism is sometimes used as a word of abuse – against movements or individuals
who are intolerant or authoritarian. Fascism is certainly intolerant and authoritarian,
but it is more than this. It is a movement that seeks to establish a dictatorship of
the right (i.e. an ultra-conservative position that rejects liberalism and anything
associated with the left). It targets communists, socialists, trade unionists, liberals
through banning their parties and their members, so that these groups cannot
exercise their political, legal or social rights. It is anti-liberal, regarding liberal values
as a form of decadence and sees them as opening the floodgates to socialist,
communist and egalitarian movements.
Defining fascism raises a problem. Fascism as a movement extols action and
practice over ideas and theory. It uses ideas with considerable opportunism, mixing
socialist ideas, avant-garde positions, anti-capitalist rhetoric, ecological argument
and pseudo-scientific ideas to do with race and ethnicity in a veritable pot-pourri.
Is it an ideology at all? Trevor Roper described fascist ideology as ‘an ill-sorted
hodge-podge of ideas’, and Laski has argued that any attempt to find a ‘philosophy
of fascism’ is a waste of time (Griffin, 1995: 1, 276). Kitchen contends that the
‘extraordinary collection of half-baked and cranky ideas certainly did not form a
coherent whole’ (1976: 28). We shall argue, however, that while fascism is peculiarly
flexible as an ideology, there are particular features that characterise it, so that a
general view of fascism can be created. Vincent argues that fascism ‘often occupies
a middle ground somewhere between rational political ideology on the one hand
and opportunist adventurism on the other’ (1995: 142).
The term derives from the fasces– the bundle of rods carried by the consuls of
ancient Rome and the word fasciowas used in Italy in the 1890s to indicate a
political group or band, usually of revolutionary socialists (Heywood, 1992: 171).
National defence groups organised after the Italian defeat at Caparetto in 1917 (see
box), also called themselves fasci(Vincent, 1995: 141).
Fascism is, however, essentially a twentieth-century movement although it draws
upon prejudices and stereotypes that are rooted in tradition. Italian fascism saw
itself as resurrecting the glories of the Roman Empire and Rocco, an Italian fascist,
saw Machiavelli as a founding father of fascist theory. Nazism (which we will argue
is an extreme form of fascism) was seen by its ideologues as rooted in the history
of the Nordic peoples, and the movement embodied anti-Semitic views that go back
to the Middle Ages in which Jews, for example, were blamed for the death of Christ,
compelled to be money-lenders, confined to ghettos and acquired a reputation for
crooked commerce.Fascism and communism
Fascism appeals particularly to those who have some property but not very much,
and are fearful that they might be plunged by market forces into the ranks of the
working class. We would, however, agree with Griffin that there is nothing ‘in
principle’ that precludes an employed or unemployed member of the working class,282 Part 2 Classical ideologies