Good morning to you, too.
Imagine my amazement when you claim these lines by you were not meant to be insulting:
> In the grad school seminar, one of the most 'sophomoric' things to do is to
> say, 'Define your terms.' (they were so defined in the freshman
> textbooks).The other 'sophomoric' thing to do is to attack a coherent
> argument where it is weakest, rather than where it is strongest
> In 400 words or less, explain your answer. Avoid the
> sophomoric traps. Show your explanatory efficacy to an unconverted audience.
Perhaps sophomore has a different meaning to you.
I actually think defining terms is important when there is substantial disagreement over the terms. Laqueur uses the term clerical fascism in relation to radical Islamic fundamentalism, but in a way I consider overbroad. Griffin thinks the term might apply to neonazi-style Christian Identity groups in the US, but not for radical Islamic fundamentalism. Matt Lyons and I use it in our book to describe both "hard" neonazi forms such as Christian Identity, but also "soft" intellectual fascist forms such as Christian Reconstructionism which we also call social totalitarianism. Griffin disagrees. One of his grad students wrote a positive review of our book pointing this disagreement out. It was a thoughtful criticism.
I understand why many people object to the use of the term totalitarian, because it surely has been manipulated and abused, especially to heat up the cold war.
Ben Bella's use of the term Integralism is vital, because he is arguing against one of the core components of fascism--its organicism. National liberation struggles can move in several directions. I am arguing that Ben Bella was moving in a relatively progressive direction for that moment for that society. I would encourage that trend in any liberation struggle.
Fascism is also a form of liberation struggle. Not a nice one.
But posting blurbs about people who say something nationalist or fundamentalist or ethnocentrist and asking "is this clerical fascism?" is not useful when there is not only disagreement over the terms, but a lack of precision over a broad range of terms being tossed about.
My argument has been that to be fascist a movement or state has to fit Griffin's basic definition. Even if Griffin disagrees with the specific application. He gets to make the definition. But once it is made, we all get to argue over what fits.
Matt Lyons and I are trying to integrate contemporary research into fascism with contemporary cultural marxist critiques. That old-school marxists hate this idea is no surprise. But the old leftist ideas of fascism are so firmly ingrained they are hard to challenge, even among leftists who do not use any type of marxist analysis. Then there are people who simply think the term fascism has lost all meaning. Same with totalitarianism. But just because terms get abused, does not mean that the defensible concepts they symbolize have no meaning in discourse. That's why defining terms is so important.
But what is the point of just tossing out bits and pieces from various ethnonationalists and asking if they are fascists when most ethnonationalists are not?
So if you don't want to define terms, there is no point to this exercise at all. I use the term as defined by Griffin. If you are unwilling to try to understand Griffin's definition, the discussion is pointless.
-Chip Berlet
Here is a useful section from something Griffin wrote that puts his definition in context:
= = = = = = = =
Revolution from the Right: Fascism
Roger Griffin
. . .
As for our working definition of fascism, a ready-made, off-the-shelf ideal type can be brought into service without resorting to a piece of conceptual do-it-your-self. In the course of the 1990s there was a growing consensus outside the Marxist camp that fascism is a form (or genus) of modern, mass politics which draws its ideological cohesion and mobilizing force from the vision of imminent national rebirth. In other words, for fascists a period of perceived national decline and decadence is giving way to an era of renewal in a post-liberal new order.
Approached from this angle, fascism is an essentially revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism (i.e. a highly chauvinistic and overtly anti-liberal nationalism). It is characterized by a populist dimension which involves mobilizing the masses to provide authentic (and not simply engineered and manipulated) support from below for the drastic actions taken by the self-appointed new elite from above to save the nation from what it perceives as terminal decline.
. . .
Another consequence to be drawn from the ideal types we have used is that, when seeking to establish which inter-war movements or regimes were fascist, our attention should focus not on external features, such as the leader cult, anti-socialism, aggressive foreign policy, or militarism, which can be displayed by many radical right formations. Instead the central criterion used is the core ideology and the policies adopted to turn it into reality, and whether they had a thrust that was ultimately reactionary in that it wanted to restore the social structures and values of the past, or rivalled communism in being innovative and revolutionary in wanting a new type of society. Inter-war fascism did not want to retain a traditional social structure in a modernized form, let alone literally return to a premodern idyll. Nor did it merely pay lip-service to the notion of mass-mobilization. Rather, even if it was forced to secure the collusion of conservative forces on tactical grounds to ease the transition from the old society, it aspired to create a new type of state, one based on the energies which flowed from a rejuvenated national community bound together by patriotic fervour.
If a number of other inter-war movements other than Italian Fascism can also be classified as fascist it is because, while the peculiar historical circumstances in which each one arose made it unique, they all shared a structurally identical myth of national renewal through mass-mobilization and proposed radical policies to achieve it. They included Nazism, Falangism, the British Union of Fascists, the Romanian Iron Guard, and Brazilian Integral Action. However, other movements often associated with fascism, such as the Irish Blue Shirts and the Rexists of inter-war Belgium, can be seen on closer inspection to have lacked the innovative radicalism or anti-traditionalism implicit in the rebirth myth needed to qualify as fascist.
Moreover, a number of authoritarian regimes often lumped together with Fascist Italy turn out on closer inspection to have pursued no radical plan to create a new ruling elite, but exercised power on behalf of conservative forces despite the fascist facade they created by adopting the external trappings of fascism (leader cult, mass rallies, shirted youth movements etc.). These ‘parafascist' regimes include Franco's Spain (1939-1975), Dollfuss' and Schuschnigg’s Austria (1933-8), Antonescu’s Romania (1940-44), and Pétain's Vichy France (1940-2). These were indeed ‘counter-revolutionary’, and tried to absorb, marginalize or eliminate not just communism, but ‘real’ fascism as well as a revolutionary threat to their ascendancy. In Spain, for example, Franco, whose basic concern was to crush the Republican forces and restore the power of landed elites, the Monarchy, and the Church, was careful to absorb the genuinely fascist Falange to give his regime an aura of dynamism and appeal to the young it would otherwise have lacked. In Romania, King Carol II first tried to crush the country’s extremely violent fascist movement, the Iron Guard, but its popularity led him to change tack and bring some of its leaders into government. After his abdication he was succeeded by General Antonescu who pretended to be prepared to share power with the Iron Guard, but then seized the first opportunity to liquidate it by force. These episodes reveal the fundamental antagonism between conservatism and fascism however much practical considerations force them into partnership.
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/Roger/fascrev.htm - - - -