Hi,
Just a reminder that not only have there been numerous books published about fascism in the last twenty years--some based in part on actual computer-based statistical analysis of voting patterns in Germany--but there have been numerous books written about contemporary neofascism.
I know I sound like a broken record, but much of what people think they know about fascism is so outdated that it is simply not useful as part of a serious left discussion.
Two points.
*** Roger Griffin has attempted a synthesis of much of the recent scholarship on fascism,and Roger Eatwell has produced a good history. Their work is worth a look at before dismissing the use of the term as meaningless or refering only to dead European thugs.
*** I did not invent the idea of contemporary clerical fascism aka theocratic fascism. It has been around for years.
As Griffin puts it: "A notable example is Fascism. Past, Present, Future (OUP, New York, 1996) by Walter Laqueur another doyen of fascist studies, which swims courageously against the current by presenting Islamic fundamentalism as a permutation of fascism within the category ‘clerical fascism’, a considerable departure from its original usage in the context of Fascist Italy."
Folks should not argue that we need to reinvent the wheel as much as do a little homework to discover that new wheels have already been invented, and they are useful.
Here is a clip from Griffin's introduction to fascism:
"Fascism [ is a ] modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence."
Find the whole article at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/FAECRG2.htm
Here is how Griffin looks at the broader picture following publication of his seminal work, "The Nature of Fascism:"
"It was ultimately the change of ethos and paradigm that has made it part of ‘common sense’ to take fascist ideology seriously as a genuinely revolutionary form of nationalism which gave the fruits of my own research a sufficiently appetizing flavour for them not to be discarded as swiftly as some other interpretations. If my approach has acquired an ephemeral importance at a formative stage in the current evolution of the debate, it has lain in two areas. Firstly, in drawing attention to the centrality to fascism’s ideological dynamics of the myth of national rebirth (and in doing so presenting a considered theoretical case for treating this myth as the elusive ‘fascist minimum’). Secondly, in demonstrating the heuristic value of the definition of fascism which results by supplying a stream (or rather a steady drip) of publications where it forms an integral part of the conceptual framework used to investigate empirically a wide range of issues relating to generic fascism. Some of these are extremely broad — the ideology of fascism, the history of the debate over fascism’s definition, the relationship between fascism and the theatre or religion, ‘fascism’ as an entry in an encyclopaedia — others highly specific: the underlying cohesion of Fascist and Nazi art policies, the temporal revolution induced by Nazi ritual politics, the fascist ideology of a French groupuscule, the debt of the programme of the Alleanza Nazionale or the Nouvelle Droite to ‘historic fascism’."
And here is the synthesis he sees emerging on the broad definition of fascism:
"The broad area of scholarly consensus which now exists, admittedly one with highly fuzzy boundaries, is that: fascism is best approached as a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn on a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led ‘armed party’ which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome the threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics, and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence."
These two clips were taken from Griffin's study of the palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology:
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/Roger/PALCORE.htm
= = = = =
See:
Griffin, Roger. (1991). The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
= = = = Fascism: A History By Roger Eatwell Penguin Books, 1996 $14.95, 404 pages ISBN: 0-14-025700-4
And a useful review of it at
http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/fah.htm
-Chip