Monsters and Machines, Part 2 – The Monster Method: Defining Fascism

This is part 2 of a series, “Monsters and Machines: The Political Language of Fascist Imperialism,” part of my Little Book/Long Essay (LB/LE) series.

Read Part 1: “To Make Lies Sound Truthful”: Orwell on Political Language

By: Andrew Gavin Marshall

The one-sentence summary: Defining the characteristics of fascism using the examples of the two historical fascist regimes that came to power of their own accord, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Part 2 – The Monster Method: Defining Fascism

One of the words that Orwell had identified in his 1946 essay as having lost nearly all meaning was that of fascism (he also said the same of democracy). If this was true in Orwell’s day, right after the end of a World War that resulted from fascist imperialism, then it is doubly true some 80 years later, when few have a living memory of what fascist imperialism looked like and what it wrought upon the world. In order to use this term while avoiding Orwell’s critique of it, I must make an effort to define it in a meaningful way.

Unlike many other ideologies, fascism has no definitive text that outlines its thoughts and ambitions in a clear, coherent, and systematic way. But we have historical examples of fascist movements, political parties, and regimes in Europe during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. While there were fascist parties and movements in nearly every industrialized nation in the early 20^th century, fascist governments were only established in five countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania. And only in Italy and Germany did they come to power through their own internal momentum. In the early 1920s, Mussolini led the Italian Fascists to storm Rome and physically attack its institutions until the King and conservative establishment agreed to form a government with the Fascists and Mussolini at its head. In Germany, the Nazi party attempted the route of a coup or insurrection in the early 1920s, failed spectacularly, and then pursued the route of electoral politics, coming to power in 1933 in a coalition government with mainstream conservative parties and figures. The cases of Austria, Hungary and Romania involve fascism coming to power largely through the influence of Nazi Germany. For our purposes, I focus on an understanding of fascism based upon the experiences of Italy and especially Germany as the only two countries where fascism organically took power as the result of its own internal political processes. These two fascist regimes also provide us with examples of countries that launched fascist wars of empire-building.

First, I will attempt to provide a baseline understanding of fascism. To do that I turn to several scholars of the subject. Robert O. Paxton identified fascism as: “a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external repression.”[1]

To put it in a slightly different manner: fascism is not simply a movement, political party, or governing regime (though it can be any and all of those things), but it is also a method of doing politics, or, as Paxton referred to it, “a form of political behaviour.” Identifying this nuance is important because it allows us to understand that fascism is not simply the end result of something, or the ideology of a self-identified fascist political party, but that it is a form of politics that anyone could theoretically engage in, whether or not they identify themselves or their objectives as being fascist. This is also important because unlike in the 1920s to 1940s when fascist movements, parties, and governments rose and fell, in the present day, fascists typically no longer use the word fascism or describe their movements as fascist. They use numerous other euphemisms to avoid use of a term which has often (and with good reason) been used as a kind of shorthand to describe political evil. Fascism may be back in fashion in the modern world, but its advocates and supporters do not generally embrace the terminology of fascism, nor understand its meaning. This is likely one of the reasons why fascism has been able to return to the political mainstream, due to its rebranding.

Fascism is a political method that can be used to accumulate power and use power. Part of the history of fascism is the history of numerous other authoritarian (non-democratic) states borrowing from fascist politics to help cement their own hold on power, because fascism had something most other authoritarian systems did not: a popular constituency, and thus, a degree of political legitimacy. In the 1930s, roughly half the countries of Europe were living under authoritarian regimes, but only two of them were fascist (Italy and Germany). Yet virtually all the others borrowed methods or symbols of fascism in order to give their own regimes greater legitimacy. Fascism had a mass base of support, and sought to energize and mobilize a radical base among the wider population, often across class lines. This does not mean that every fascist party had to be popular, most weren’t, and most never came close to power. But they attempted to mobilize mass bases of support to propel them through elections or in some cases coups that have a sense of popular legitimacy. Most authoritarian regimes historically and presently represent the interests of a small, largely conservative, military, religious and/or wealthy elite. Such regimes rarely generate popular support and a mass base of militant activists. But they might borrow from fascist regimes and fascist politics to appeal to some of the population, or at least appear to.

The mass politics and appeal of fascism is unique among extreme right-wing, authoritarian politics. This is a vital distinction between fascist regimes and other forms of authoritarianism, as its popular appeal and mass base can fuel radicalization of the regime.  The militant base includes paramilitary elements – that is, non-state military actors such as militias and other armed gangs. These often battle political enemies in the streets, typically from the left, and intimidate rivals. They portray their actions as an effort to establish “order” (blaming all the chaos and violence on their political enemies of the Left), which often makes them not only threatening but useful to conservative elites (who often share the same enemies as fascists). Paramilitary activities can help fascists get into power, through violence or the threat of violence, and consolidate power once they have it. Paramilitarism also provides a basis for a highly militaristic movement that praises the use of military power and violence.

Thus far we have established that fascism is a method of politics that seeks to build a mass base of support and utilize paramilitary violence and intimidation in order to accumulate and consolidate power. But that is still only part of the story. In order to mobilize that base, fascist politics inflames grievances among the population, presenting itself and its ‘group’ as being victimized and humiliated (by minority groups, elites, outside powers, historical injustices). It presents itself as being perpetually under siege and attacked by internal and external enemies who want to destroy the nation and its ‘people’. This gets to one of the most important facets of fascism: it is an extreme form of nationalism, sometimes referred to as ultra-nationalism. All its claims of humiliation and victimhood are not simply referring to a particular group or community within the nation, but to the nation itself. This has the added effect of conflating the two to a new extreme: the community or group that fascists claim to represent are then identified as the only legitimate people of the nation. This means that those who are outside of this distinct group are to be denied the privileges of being part of the nation. The group is the nation, and the nation is the group. Fascism seeks to redress their sense of victimhood by “re-taking” their nation and “re-establishing” themselves as the dominant group within it, and thus, they must exclude, remove, or otherwise repress or “cleanse” the nation of those they deem undesirable or a threat.

This fascist form of nationalism identifies the ‘in-group’ (the nation) based upon a shared race, ethnicity, or religion, and those who do not meet these criteria are no longer considered part of ‘the nation’. In fact, they are identified as its internal (and external) enemies and must be dealt with if the nation and its community are to survive and thrive. Fascists do this in order to create their true, “pure” nation and community. To achieve this, fascism needs a broad base of support, the backing of committed nationalist activists and paramilitaries. They must embrace these discriminatory, hateful prejudices and moral obscenities, often wrapped up for them in a conspiratorial fantasy world where they are always and perpetually under threat. This generates an extremism in their attitudes, actions, and objectives.

To update our evolving definition: fascism is a method of politics that embraces an extreme form of nationalism, used to build a mass base of support through emotional appeals to a sense of victimhood and humiliation, utilizing paramilitary violence and intimidation in order to accumulate and consolidate power, and the exercise of power to purify the nation and remove – or ‘cleanse’ – those considered threats or unwanted. The concepts and efforts to purify and cleanse the nation are the mobilizing aspects of fascism, those parts which aim to build a popular base of support, which, it should be noted, does not mean the support of the majority of the population, but it requires a significant minority in order to achieve power. The base of committed nationalists and paramilitary activists give the movement or party a sense of wider legitimacy, as well as often providing the basis for its radicalization. But for fascism to achieve power, and wield it, it requires cooperation and collaboration with establishment elites.

Fascism would often present itself as a ‘revolutionary’ movement, but it only ever gained power when it cooperated with elites and the existing power structures, not by overturning those structures. Mussolini got into power following arrangements with the King and established conservative leaders. Hitler only got into power after back-room deals between numerous conservative parties and Germany’s then-President Hindenberg. But it was Mussolini’s paramilitaries who stormed Rome that helped give him the political leverage to gain entry into power, while Hitler’s Nazi Party made various gains in multiple elections that gave him leverage to gain entry to power. In both cases, the first fascist governments were governments that ruled in coalition with other right-wing, conservative parties of the establishment. (Mussolini never really escaped this dynamic, while Hitler eventually subdued the establishment under Nazi rule). Without the support of elites, fascism would fail to gain political power.

This collaboration was essential for several reasons. From the perspective of the fascists, cooperation with conservative elites was the most efficient way to get into power. Removing and replacing power structures is complex and time-consuming. Fascist preoccupation was not with a social or political revolution, but a cultural one: they want to elevate and make superior their chosen community and return the nation to a place of great power and respect. They did not want to upend the established social order and its hierarchies, in fact, they typically wanted to reinforce them. Thus, fascists embraced collaboration in order to access power and reinforce existing social (religious, racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual) hierarchies.

Elites embraced fascists because they wanted to establish for themselves a more popular base of support, and thus, legitimacy. They also wanted to avoid a direct confrontation with fascists and their paramilitaries, potentially pitting the armed forces against militias which could result in mass violence and civil war. Thus, they did it to avoid confrontation and gain legitimacy, and they typically believed that – being the more experienced practitioners of power – they would be able to keep the fascists in line and subdue their more radical beliefs and objectives. Elites thought that by inviting fascists into the government they could control them, whereas fascists thought that by working with elites they could gain control of the government. Together, both fascists and conservative elites sought to dismantle their democratic systems and establish an authoritarian form of government. Democracy was increasingly viewed as unstable, unfair, and threatening. To the fascists, democracy and equality threatened their sense of racial, religious, or cultural superiority over other groups; to the conservative elites, democracy and equality threatened their control over the political and economic levers of power. Both groups found common cause in dismantling democratic systems in order to preserve and protect existing hierarchies.

In pursuit of this goal, fascists and elites also needed each other to avoid provoking a revolution, coup, or civil war. In other words, if elites pursued authoritarianism without fascist support, they would risk a popular backlash or revolution; if fascists pursued authoritarianism without elite support, they would provoke a coup or civil war. Thus, fascism can achieve power in a society only when enough of the established elites have given up on democracy and are willing to cooperate with fascists. This also reveals another important, but overlooked, fact about fascism: it is a product of democratic societies and democratic politics, though its success in those political systems is dependent upon those democratic structures being weak or failing. Historically, fascism rose in Italy and Germany in collapsed empires that were relatively new and weak democracies. Presently, fascism arises in America and Israel – two declining empires that are relatively older, and increasingly weakened democracies.

Once in power, fascists pursue their goals of redeeming the ‘community’ and the ‘nation’ from their perceived humiliations. They seek to “cleanse” the nation of all its impurities, whether they are defined as cultural, ethnic, religious, racial, gendered or sexual. They also seek to elevate the “pure” community to a politically and culturally superior status. Italian Fascism was more preoccupied with establishing a culturally superior ‘new man’ and community, whereas Nazi German fascism was more preoccupied with creating a racially superior community. In both cases, Italians and Germans made claims to mythical pasts to justify their redemptive pursuit of ‘purity.’ The Italians invoked ancient imperial Rome, and Hitler invoked an ancient Nordic and Germanic ‘Aryan’ mythical past. Mussolini once declared, “Rome… is our point of departure and reference; it is our symbol, or if you wish, our myth… Much of what was the immortal spirit of Rome, resurges in Fascism.”[2] Hitler also, incidentally, made claims to ancient Rome as well, not as a mythical past for the Germans but in terms of an imperial example worth following. Hitler stated that the Germans were the “Nordic Romans,” and praised their military organization and methods of war and peace. He once observed: “In every peace treaty the next war is already built in. That is Rome! That is true statesmanship!” As Hitler said in 1941 to his chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, “Even today… the Roman empire never had its like. To have succeeded in completely dominating all neighbouring peoples! And no empire has spread so unified a civilization as Rome did.”[3] Though there are an endless litany of reasons as to why ancient Rome differed from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (not least of which was because it was a racially and culturally diverse empire), but it was its mythical grandeur, its symbols and impressive architecture, and its vast empire and ruthless ways of war that appealed to the fascist imagination.

Fascism thus also embraced empire-building. While there were certainly fascist movements and parties around the world that professed to be anti-imperialist, the examples we have of fascist regimes in power, Italy and Germany, were distinctly imperialistic. These were two countries that had both become unified nation-states only as recently as the 1860s and 1870s, relatively young by European standards (to note: Canada was formed as a confederated nation-state in 1867, roughly four years before Germany unified into a single nation-state in 1871). Germany was also explicitly founded as a nation and empire, and Italy too took on an imperial agenda. World War I left the German empire collapsed, its possessions (colonies, such as those in southwest Africa) taken away, its national territory reduced in size, its access to resources and industry strictly regulated, its economy devastated, its military defanged and demobilized. To nationalists and many citizens alike, Germany was left humiliated and victimized by the outcome of the war, a war they were told they were winning right up until the moment of unconditional surrender in 1918. Italy, which was on the winning side of the war, did not get any of the spoils of war, despite apparent promises that it would gain new territories, and so was also left rather humiliated and disparaged. The Great War, as it was known at the time, left much of Europe in a major economic, social, and political crisis.

Those soldiers who were not among the millions killed returned to their home countries in a state of economic crisis and social chaos. Economies tanked, unemployment soared, prices rose, mass protests, labour unrest and even revolutionary movements emerged. Russia had experienced a revolution during the Great War, which then turned into a civil war. Brief communist revolutions also took place in Hungary and Germany in 1919, but were ultimately violently crushed by new paramilitary right-wing militias formed by former soldiers. But in Germany, the result was the formation of the Weimar Republic, the country’s first experiment with mass democracy, which lasted from 1919 until the Nazis took power 14 years later in 1933.

Extreme nationalists were able to capitalize on post-War conditions, and paramilitary organizations formed the backbones of many of these movements. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s paramilitaries behind his Fascist movement crushed labour unrest and battled leftists, eventually marching on Rome and attacking government buildings in 1922. The Italian King Victor Emannuel III, instead of authorizing the government to declare a state of siege and mobilize the armed forces to crush the fascists, potentially igniting a civil war, opted to dismiss the sitting government and appoint a new cabinet of right-wing conservative figures, with Mussolini as prime minister. It would be another eleven years before fascism would take power in another country.

Nationalism played on the sense of humiliation brought by the war and its aftermath. While a German sense of victimhood resulted from the loss of territories, the Italian sense of victimhood derived from their not gaining any new territories, despite prior understandings that they would. Italy was a nation humiliated by its own allies in the war, and a relatively minor imperial presence in the world (hence, its allies treating it with little deference). Germany was a once great and powerful nation and empire, now deprived of its empire and reduced as a nation. One of the enduring German myths that helped propel the fascists into power was the belief – also widely shared among nationalists and the public at large – that Germany didn’t lose the war, but was betrayed – “stabbed in the back” – by traitors in the home front: liberals, socialists, leftists, Jews and women! It was not that the German imperial and political leadership, the army, and the aristocracy were consistently lying about the progress of the war until they succumbed to it (though they were!); it was that leftists and Jews had “betrayed” the armed forces and the emperor and surrendered on Germany’s behalf (even though it was literally German generals who officially and directly surrendered, and then who personally helped invent this myth to cover up their own actions). This came to be known as “the stabbed in the back myth,” and was a foundational ideology not only of the Nazis, but much of the German right and society more broadly. It also helped to infuse German nationalism with imperialism, becoming mutually reinforcing: a powerful nation can create and maintain a vast empire, and an empire can feed and fuel a strong nation. If one declines, so too does the other. And in the post-War German Weimar Republic, a large, strong nation and expansive empire were reduced to a smaller, weaker nation, with no empire; and in its place, a new, relatively weak democracy was established. Therefore, nationalists who were aggrieved by the loss of territory and empire – and internalized the humiliation and victimhood it represented – also extended their hatred and humiliation to the system of democracy itself. Fascism and imperialism were thus intertwined from the beginning.

Their visions of empire were not simply about expanding their power, but also their territory, whether through annexing neighbouring land or colonizing lands further away. Fascist imperialism sought to redress the perceived humiliation and victimhood of their nations by establishing themselves among the great powers, redrawing borders and colonizing and settling new conquered lands. This is clearly not exclusively fascist, as this describes most imperial or colonial powers. But fascist imperialism is perhaps distinct in its speed and destructive and murderous power. With paramilitarism so important to fascist movements, fascism has a deeply ingrained admiration for violence to demonstrate, exercise, and consolidate power. At the global level, this translates into a highly militaristic and violent process of empire-building, pursued with great rapidity. Fascists are impatient and want to build their empires quickly, and thus, see violence or the threat of violence as the most efficient and effective tool to pursue their international political objectives. Additionally, their hyper-nationalistic goals of ‘internal cleansing’ and ‘purifying’ the community and nation extend to the imperial sphere. Internal threats to the nation are reimagined as external threats to the empire. Empire and nation are inextricably linked, and the revival or greatness of one, requires the revival and greatness of the other. The threats to one become the threats to the other.

Where fascists conquer new territories, their methods of cleansing and purification reach previously unseen levels of violence and destruction. And because they are pursuing these objectives in conquered lands and colonies, they are unrestrained by the existing laws and competing power centers that restrain fascists at home. (It’s harder to get away with shooting your own citizens in the streets than it is to mass murder tens of thousands of citizens of some conquered territory elsewhere). As such, it is within conquered territories that fascists are free to engage in their most radical and violent experiments to create their ‘pure’ communities and do away with those deemed unworthy or enemies. Mussolini sought to build Italy’s empire in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Balkans. While many point to the differences in regimes between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, often noting that Italy was not repressive of its Jewish population (until later pressure from Germany) or particularly brutal within Italy itself; it was in places like Ethiopia where one saw the true face of Italian Fascism in its genocidal war of conquest that killed several hundreds of thousands between 1935 and 1936 (three years before World War II). Nazi Germany, while certainly more discriminatory and oppressive on the home front than Italy was, expressed its greatest violence and brutality in its empire to the east. It is noteworthy that most concentration camps and death camps were not inside Germany itself, but in Nazi conquered lands in Eastern Europe; that the greatest victims of Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies were not simply German Jews, but Eastern European Slavic Jews in the lands Germany conquered. There would have been no Holocaust if the Nazis hadn’t conquered new lands and built a vast empire. It was more challenging for the Nazis to officially discriminate against the Jews in Germany than it was for them to exterminate the Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

These ruthless and rapid forms of empire-building sought to dramatically alter the existing global hierarchy of states and empires. Not only did they want a place at the top for themselves, but they wanted to redesign the world political map, to change the established global order. They would build for themselves regional and global spheres of influence. Italy was interested in establishing its empire in north and east Africa and around the Mediterranean (reminiscent of the Roman Empire), whereas Hitler and the Nazis were most interested in building a vast agrarian empire to the east, ultimately taking over much of the then-Soviet Union. Their eventual alliance with Imperial Japan complimented this objective as Japan sought to expand its own empire rapidly and ruthlessly across east and southeast Asia, replacing many of the European colonial powers that dominated that region at the time, and establishing its own ‘New Order’ in Asia. This is what is referred to as a ‘revisionist power’, a country that seeks to ‘revise’ or redesign the global political order, by placing themselves at the top and center of it. Not all revisionist powers are fascist, but all fascist powers are revisionist in that they seek to change the global system to their benefit, and they do this through the pursuit of empire-building, through deal-making, onerous trade agreements with weaker powers, threats, intimidation, and outright violence and brutality: the ultimate destructive and murderous power of the state.

I would like to return now to updating and completing our working definition of fascism. To be clear, there is no one accepted definition of fascism among scholars of the subject. But I began this section with a lengthy quote from one of those scholars, Robert O. Paxton, from his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, because I felt it provided the best single comprehensive definition of fascism I have read. But I didn’t want to just drop that quote and move on; I felt it necessary to dissect and explore the ideas within it, perhaps add in a few additional ones, and rephrase it for the purposes of this essay, to just explore and understand the language better (after all, academic language – much like political language – can often be more vague than enlightening). So I will attempt to summarize our review of fascism above into a specific definition, and afterwards I encourage the reader to return to the Paxton quote at the start of this section and see if you don’t get more out of it.

Our descriptive definition: Fascism is a method of politics that emerges in weakened democracies and declining or collapsed empires, that attempts to build a mass base of support and utilize paramilitary violence to intimidate and gain access to power, which requires collaboration with established elites in a shared project to dismantle democracy and establish an authoritarian system of government, to return‘greatness’ to the nation, expand its borders, and build or rebuild a great empire, requiring militarism and imperialism; and which invokes as its primary ideology an extremist nationalism and mythical past, infused with an overriding sense of grievance, humiliation and victimhood, for which the solution is to purify and cleanse the nation: to elevate its chosen community to a superior status (to ‘purify’) while dominating, excluding, expelling, imprisoning or killing (to ‘cleanse’) or otherwise remove internal enemies, threats, or those unworthy of status in the nation, defined along racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or gendered categories.

This definition is so specific that it can only historically apply to our two principal examples of Italy and Germany in the post-World War I era. But this is what returns some meaning to the word fascism, because it can’t be applied so easily to so many countries, parties or movements without losing its meaning again. For our purposes, we define fascism essentially by the examples of Italy and Germany alone, which is to say, by the “success stories” of fascists coming to power as a result of their own political momentum. Thus, in applying this definition to present day, we also limit our use of the term to countries that are experiencing fascism as a part of its governing apparatus, where it has already made its way into the halls of power (though has not yet fully dismantled democratic structures and established an authoritarian system), which, coincidentally, also happens to be just two countries, Israel and the United States.

Fascism is important to identify and understand as distinct because it was distinctly destructive and murderous. To achieve their goals of national revival, internal cleansing, and external expansion, the two historical fascist regimes upended the global order and launched a clash of empires that resulted in the most violent and destructive war the world has ever witnessed, with the most rapid and industrialized form of genocide ever witnessed. Fascist extremism did not stay within its own borders, but sought to redraw and expand borders, and with it, accelerate and expand its extremism. Thus, fascism is distinctly radical and destructive, which makes it not only a major threat to those deemed to be ‘undesirables’ within a fascist society, but a threat to the world as a whole.

It is fascist imperialism that poses such a threat to the world. So, what do scholars of fascism have to say about the expansionist, imperial and territorial components of fascism?

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[1] Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage Books, 2004), 218-219.

[2] Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton University Press, 2017), 39-40.

[3] Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton University Press, 2017), 42.

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Andrew Gavin Marshall is a researcher and writer on issues of political and economic history, empire, war, oligarchies, and resistance movements. He has been studying in and out of school and writing for 20 years, published in various journals, papers, think tanks, and online publications, and is currently getting a degree in History and Political Science at the University of Toronto. His website is empireandeconomics.com, which has a YouTube channel, and you can listen to his podcast, ‘In This Mad World,’ or follow him on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

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Andrew Gavin Marshall