An Attempt at a Good Definition of Fascism

To me any sort of race-based, obsessive, dishonest, and “blood and soil” or “volkisch” politics, fascist or not, is “Nazi.” And any fascism that is race-based (keep in mind a lot of fascism isn’t necessarily about race), is Nazism. Nazism is simply racist fascism.

It includes the usual obsession with the racial enemies of the people, an idiotic and absurd supremacist view of the “glorious past” in a “volkisch” sense, an obsessive, one-track mind about the ultranationalism, a view of the present as degenerate and too democratic because racial enemies have “contaminated” the body politic.

An important aspect is a “palingetic” view of the future rising, Phoenix-like, from ashes of the degenerate, “racially contaminated” present and the need for a revolution get rid of the “contaminating” non-national elements to bring about the rebirth of the great society via the mirror of a fake glorious past.

See this article here  on Palingentic Ultranationalism, which is as good of a solid base for fascism as anything.

Roger Griffin is definitely onto something. Griffin claims that any movement without this “Phoenix-like” palingenesis is simply not fascism. He also says that this is the essential element in any fascist ideology – the base, necessary and sufficient element for any type of fascist politics.

In other words, palingetic political projects are probably fascist.

Without palingenesis, there is no fascism. There are a lot of authoritarian, Far Right movements (especially in Latin America) that seem to lack this element. Down there, the radical authoritarian Right is all about “screw the poor” and “death to the Commies,” the Commies being the Left, far too generously defined.

For instance, members of labor unions are automatically Communist. So are Catholic lay workers working with the poor. So is any redistributionism. So is any attempt at social betterment (for instance, many far Right coups in Latin America happened simply because the “Leftist” and “Communist” state tried to raise the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage down there is literally Communism and doing so automatically makes one a Communist.

It’s horrific, murderous, even genocidal, radical Far Right authoritarian form of politics for sure.

I’m not sure if it’s actual fascism. Some really evil far rightwing forms of politics are not necessarily fascist, though they often have serious overtones like that.

Radical authoritarian Far Right movements and parties are not necessarily racist at all, though there can be overtones of that because these regimes wage wars on the poor, and many of the poor are racially Amerindian, Black, or mulatto.

For instance, the murderous and genocidal counterinsugencies recently in Guatemala against the URNG and in Peru against the Shining Path were in large part based on a “slaughter the Indians” mindset, not because there was anything racially wrong with them but because the Indians were “Communists” who were supporting the armed Left.