Linguistic purists and ardent advocates of political correctness often warn that in our public speech the term fascism is used too lightly, i.e. that it is mainly about mere labeling, without any responsibility and awareness of the complexity of that term. According to these supervisors of public discourse, this arbitrariness, and thus the possible error, would not exist if everyone who reached for the mentioned term was familiar with its precise definition. Aside from the fact that these "precise" definitions are vague and unclear and that to this day they are corrected and polemics are started every now and then. Since Mussolini's coming to power, which represents the first official enthronement of fascist ideology in a country, various forms of both official and alternative fascist concepts have appeared during these hundred years.
When we add to that the intrusions of various fascist narratives in the contemporary political turmoil of the right - and no longer in some despots and juntas of the underdeveloped or third world, but in the heart of Europe, where Marine Le Pen tries to relax her ultra-rightism from anti-Semitism, and her ideological colleagues in Italy to reconcile radical nationalism and Europeanism - then it becomes much clearer to us how ungrateful it is to talk about some universally acceptable and precise register of today's extreme right. More precisely, all these experiences force us to ask the question - "What is fascism?" we focus on the question - "From what can all fascism arise?".
In his famous essay "Ur fascism", Umberto Eco says that fascism "has become an all-purpose term because one or more elements can be removed from a fascist regime and it will still be recognizable as fascist". In support of that claim, Eko offers us examples of truncated, yet clearly recognizable fascist concepts: "Subtract imperialism from fascism and you will have Franco and Salazar again. Take away his colonialism, and you will have the Balkan fascism of the Ustasha again. Add to Italian fascism radical anti-capitalism (which never impressed Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add the cult of Celtic mythology and the mysticism of the Holy Grail (which is completely foreign to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected gurus of fascism - Julius Evola.”
Which is to say, if a fascist can only be someone who meets all the conditions and certain precise definitions, then we can rest easy, because the number of such certified fascists is certainly not worrying. Simply, that definition would amnesty, for example, numerous extreme nationalists who would practice their extremism only on the territory of their countries, without interfering in the affairs of their neighbors. Because, the one who advocates for the cleansing of different people in his space may be an extreme nationalist, chauvinist or racist, but he is not yet a fascist. Or, for example, if a "patriot" advocates the exclusion of the physically and mentally handicapped from the reproduction process in order to create a "healthy" nation, then he cannot so easily and irresponsibly be called a fascist, but an advocate of eugenics.
Thanks to the caution of linguistic purists and advocates of precise definitions, to their tiptoeing in public speech, we today have a frenzied revisionism in it which, among other things, reveals to us new research achievements according to which there is no technical evidence of the existence of gas chambers, and those who they may be revisionists, but they are not fascists, because a real fascist, I guess, has to advocate a lot more.
History shows us that perhaps the biggest problem with fascism at the time of its emergence, as well as in the cases of its later origins, is precisely the reticence of those who were obliged to recognize it and call it by its proper name in time. All of them, similar to Vittorio Emanuele or the German bourgeoisie, believed that these were phenomena, some scattered elements of militarism and racism, which would not be able to generate a general state. None of them knew, and most likely today's political consciousness is not at a higher level, that fascism needs one of its holding elements to grow a baobab from that sprout. Or, as Eco says: “These elements cannot make up a system, many of them are mutually contradictory and are typical of many other types of despotism or fanaticism. But one of them is enough to open space for fascism, which will congeal around him."
Fascism especially demonstrated its astonishing powers of modification after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the gradual collapse of the bipolar geopolitical structure of the world. In the XNUMXs, in many Slavic countries, the area inhabited by the population that was once planned to be slaves in the Reich and which suffered the most from that Reich, various Nazi organizations sprouted like mushrooms, some of which managed to infiltrate official policies. Young Polish, Ukrainian, Slovakian, and no less, Russian skinheads adorned themselves with Nazi insignia, and often upgraded rituals and semiotics with concrete violence against Roma, minorities, and synagogues. We watched all this amazed and sad, remembering, at least the older ones, how perverse it sounded to us when Nina Andrejevna in Zafranovićeva Occupation in 26 pictures He shouts excitedly: "My friends, we have to support Hitler!". Simply, that message was somehow not accompanied by the music of Nina Andreevna's language, at least that was the case in those innocent years at the end of the seventh decade of the last century.
But let's go back to "precise definitions". They are, as the genre dictates, focused on the ideological, political and social components of fascism, thus persistently maintaining and keeping them within the framework of the big story. That's why any reference to those definitions of fascism - which, by the nature of things, do not cover its manifestations in the privacy zone - is a kind of imposition to talk about fascism mainly as an ideology, and rarely as a conviction. An individual can acquire it, among other things, through a wrong perception of the circumstances in which he finds himself. Thus, experience shows us that a small ordinary person, when he finds himself in socio-economic circumstances that threaten his existence, is very inclined to believe that the different and minority in his environment are to blame for the situation in which he finds himself. The "Weimar despair" and the conviction that "Jewish moneylenders" were to blame for the existential suffering of the Germans was present in a good part of the German population precisely as a private feeling, on which only later would be grafted first the brutality of the brown shirts, and after that the cold-blooded promptness of the black shirts. Although, perhaps some stubborn linguistic purist could say that it was about anti-Semitism, not fascism. Simply, fascism can live in a small private sector as well as in a large system of the Reich, i.e. it has its recognizable manifestation both in ideology and political practice as well as in conviction. Although every story about the causality of fascism leads us to the dilemma - which is older, the chicken or the egg, it is clear that there is no such system that can impose its ideology without the thing to be imposed on being sensitized to the elements of that ideology in certain social circumstances.
In the cult film Hate There is a scene by Matju Kasovic that is a kind of croc masterpiece on the subject of that "little" private fascism, or rather racism as the most pliable germ for its "clotting". From the atmosphere, to the mise-en-scène, to the monologue of one of the main characters, everything in this scene is masterfully done. Let's recall: at the top of the escalators in the metro, a small ordinary Frenchman appears, probably a worker. At the bottom, to the left and right of the exit from the escalator, stand two of the three main characters, the black Iber and the Arab Said. The scene opens with a sequence of escalators that move downwards and, as will be explained in Ibero's monologue, symbolize the system. While in the background we see the descent of a small common man-worker, in the foreground Iber says to Said: “Look at all those calves that have allowed themselves to be carried by the system! Look at this! He doesn't seem evil per se. But those who don't use the escalator are those who vote for Le Pen, but are not racist. They are the ones who protest when the escalator breaks down." Certainly, a large number of Germans at the end of the twenties did not share their convictions with the National Socialists, who from the 1928 elections, in which they took 2,5% of the electorate, grew to 18% in the 1930 elections, and to 37% in the July 1932 elections. But, many from those non-national socialists they wanted the system to work, to fix the escalators that had not worked for a long time, and the mechanics were offered and they seemed so efficient. In that small private desire for the system to function flawlessly - for all its cogs, screws and cables to be tightened - often hid the germ around which fascism used to coagulate so effectively.
The general synergy of those private aspirations and expectations, which are previously synergized in the aspirations and expectations of certain collectivities, is the basic prerequisite for realizing the socio-political totality of this totalitarian ideology. How this process unfolds is best shown by the situation before the July elections in Germany in 1933, after which the NSDAP won 230 seats in the Reichstag. A good number of voters in almost every social grouping had their own expectations of the National Socialists, although many of them showed odium towards the radicalism of these militant nationalists. The bourgeoisie saw in them an effective obstacle to the communists and the social revolution; the conservatives were lured by their national program; representatives of large financial capital saw in National Socialism new opportunities that were somehow limited by the democratic system; in addition to communism and social democracy, for a significant part of the working class, national socialism also acted as a savior solution; at the end, or at the beginning, the reanimation of militarism, along with the macho rituals of order and discipline, and how they offered comfort to ordinary citizens, for whom the Versailles decisions had long caused disappointment and a sense of humiliation. In other words, there were many germs that made possible the general coagulation of fascism and the general Gleichschaltung of German society. Perhaps it is precisely the level of agility of that monolithicization that will follow, unprecedented in the history of political-administrative interventions in a society, that essentially determines fascism, or rather, makes some sort of difference between that ideological concept and other right-wing extremisms. No known autocracy or despotism went as deep as the National Socialists did with their Gleichschalt since 1933 - from political parties, universities and the church to Masonic lodges, singing societies, sports and chess clubs. By imposing paranoia in which nothing is harmless, fascism created an environment not only of complete lack of freedom, but also of complete restlessness, which is a key prerequisite for the realization of its totality, in which the individual will be permanently controlled in his social activities and constantly threatened by the consequences of resisting this control .
Perhaps that is why in those still working versions of the definitions of fascism, the most precise are those that define fascism as the ultimate stage of totalitarian political practice, i.e. one that is one step away from dystopia. In dystopia, as a hypothetical model, the system is no longer maintained by political practices, but rather by the created environment of fear and psychosis. In deeper dystopian literature - and it should be looked for in Huxley and Zamyatin, rather than in Orwell - there is no concrete torture anymore, it has been overcome, i.e. it has done its job by creating a system in which the individual no longer risks being subjected to torture. In other words, dystopia occurs when an individual begins to maintain the system with his fear, i.e. that he no longer does anything that would force that system to use torture.
Historical experience teaches us that fascism might have had the exclusive right to the thesis that defines it as the ultimate stage of totalitarian political practice if history had not introduced us to Stalinism, which in this context is its counterpart at the other end of the ideological spectrum. That's why, let's avoid definitions, let's not wait until we recognize fascism only in that which contains all its elements, because what fascism can arise from is often present in our closest environment and can act so harmlessly. And it wouldn't be worse to remember that epilogue from Brecht's play The sustained rise of Artur Ui, especially since in it the trigonometry that reigns in the triangle of capitalism - crime - fascism is problematized:
"Look instead of staring!
Let work replace empty talk.
We suffered from that wild beast!
Barely in blood she would be overcome.
Don't be in a hurry to be happy,
Even more fertile is the womb that has given birth."
The author is a writer and literary critic
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