![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWhenever I've been asked to define fascism, I've always called it a sort of synthetic modernity. Fascism and political movements kindred to fascism developed, in the early 20th century world, in nation-states--often new ones, almost always disadvantaged ones--where economic growth and the collapse of the traditional patriarchal and patrimonial social systems left traditional cultures completely unable to cope. Had things proceeded smoothly and without incident, these problems might have been overcome by the sort of straightforward modernization enjoyed by the Anglo-American world, most of northern Europe, and (I'd say) Third Republic France. As it happened history was full of incidents and traditional culture become something as highly valued as the ability to compete for power in the modern world. Fascism appeared, promising to create modern powerful economies and states even as its leaders announced their exceptionally active support for traditional hierarchies of power based on class, gender, race, and the like. Fascism promised to give traditionalists the most useful elements of the new even as it guaranteed the old, hence its popularity.
Of late I've been inclined to distinguish between fascism and Naziism, if only because Naziism was much more innovative and radical in practice and in theory than fascism. The well-known phenomenon of clerical fascism that touched even Québec I took as proof. But then, I just had to remember the well-reported fun that the son of Mussolini, anti-Communist bulwark of the bourgeois world, felt on dropping incendiary bombs on fleeing terrified Ethiopians, or indeed the interest felt by some Fascists--as described in R.J.B. Bosworth's recent biography of Mussolini--in finally solving Italy's northeastern frontier problems by dealing decisively with the Slovenes.
I should never have forgotten that all fascists, Nazis and otherwise, loved the idea of violence directed towards defenseless deserving victims.
Of late I've been inclined to distinguish between fascism and Naziism, if only because Naziism was much more innovative and radical in practice and in theory than fascism. The well-known phenomenon of clerical fascism that touched even Québec I took as proof. But then, I just had to remember the well-reported fun that the son of Mussolini, anti-Communist bulwark of the bourgeois world, felt on dropping incendiary bombs on fleeing terrified Ethiopians, or indeed the interest felt by some Fascists--as described in R.J.B. Bosworth's recent biography of Mussolini--in finally solving Italy's northeastern frontier problems by dealing decisively with the Slovenes.
[In January 1943, Count] Ciano gained further insight into the mind of this incarnation of the new generation of Fascists. Vidussoni turned up at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the Balkans and the instability which continued to plague Italy's north-eastern border, where guerrilla opposition to Fascist governance was spreading. His ideas were straightforward. Italy should liquidate all Slovenes. Ciano, in his role as statesman and bourgeois, 'permitted himself to note that there were more than a million of them.' 'No matter,' came the reply. 'We should behave with them as the ascari [Italy's black colonial troops from Eritrea and the Somaliland] do with their enemies, simply exterminate them.' Here, it seemed, was a young man who had indeed imbibed the spirit of the times in the Axis (though his use of black models hinted that he, too, had failed to plumb the meaning of 'scientific racism' (383).
I should never have forgotten that all fascists, Nazis and otherwise, loved the idea of violence directed towards defenseless deserving victims.
