The word “fascism” has recently grow to be a key element of political terminology again. The headlines immediately following Donald Trump’s election as US president read like a disturbing question-and-answer session.
“Is Donald Trump a fascist?” he asked Newsweek. The Washington Post responded by stating “Donald Trump is actually a fascist”but then I attempted to quantify things in slightly more detail “How Fascist is Donald Trump?”. Meanwhile, Salon agreed “Donald Trump is a real fascist”.
This all raises the query: what exactly counts as fascism? This is a problem that has a history, similar to Nazism and fascism themselves. And similarly, it will not be without controversy.
Defining what counted as Nazism and fascism within the immediate aftermath of World War II was an urgent task facing Allied administrators and lawyers in Germany and Italy. Examining these projects and their effects can assist shed some light on how we talk, and maybe how we should think before we talk, about fascism today.
Nazis on trial
The Allies charged many members of the Nazi leader with a series of war crimes at Nuremberg in 1946. Historical transcriptions depict full of life debates about who’s a Nazi in a rustic where 8.5 million people were members of the Nazi Party. At Nuremberg, neither the German state nor the German people were found collectively guilty. However, several major Nazi organizations were deemed criminal.
However, in the course of the trials, it was individual individuals who were publicly punished. In total, 24 top political and military officials were tried and ten were hanged.
Wikipedia/National Archives and Records Administration
Later attempt Adolf Eichmann reopened the query of collective and individual responsibility. Eichmann was a high-ranking Nazi official and was sentenced to death in a trial in 1960. He was hanged in 1962. Over the years he argued he finally stated that his trial was an attempt to individualize the responsibility of the Nazis. Eichmann was isolated as a particular perpetrator, while prosecutors largely ignored the existence of the remainder of the Nazi criminal machine. As within the immediate post-war period, balancing individual and collective responsibility was a posh and difficult process.
After Mussolini
In Italy, Allied military administrators faced an identical task. When Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943, it was crucial to resolve whether Italy was still an aggressor nation or whether it had fallen victim to Mussolini’s regime. Were Mussolini and Fascism the identical as Italy and Italians, or were they separate things?
Ultimately, the latter perspective was adopted. In his defining statement on the topic, titled “Who is a Fascist,” Italian liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce he argued that fascism is a disease that may affect any specific individual, no matter his or her origin. The punishment must subsequently be based on the identical logic: no particular social category could be guilty – not even members of the fascist party.
Therefore, unlike within the German case, no collective charges were brought in Italy. It is true that in 1946 collective amnesty for fascist crimes and just about all previously prosecuted fascists were released. In the last decade and a half for the reason that end of the war, a revived version of Mussolini’s fascist party has helped prop up the ruling coalition (whose direct descendant had just polled in 4.35% within the Italian elections).
How we talk about fascism
Today, each recent electoral success of the far right or white supremacist protest is greeted with shock. We cannot consider how many individuals show up at such events. Perhaps it’s because we still regard fascism as a political disease that, almost by definition, affects only a small variety of particularly pathological cases. Of course, this was not the case in Germany and Italy under Hitler and Mussolini, even when the processes of denazification and defascistization largely concerned small groups of people.
Of course, these processes have taken for much longer than the time-frame of any particular trial and, as many argue, remain incomplete. In no case did people go to bed as fascists and get up the following day as liberal democrats. But when we talk about fascism today, we often talk as if this model of regimes were accurate: we are concerned with identifying people – like Trump – who do or don’t “consider” fascist, as in the event that they were on trial.
But just as fascism was not defeated by process alone, the identical is true of the ways through which these movements have developed and appear to be developing today. They are usually not the spontaneous results of a sudden transformation of specific people, but stages of an open process. Their roots are scattered and difficult to grasp. Capturing them is maybe tougher than naming specific individuals as “fascist,” but it surely is definitely no less than as necessary.
