The Roots And Reason Of Fascism

7 Pages 1719 Words

What exactly is fascism? Where did it come from? What on earth is it good for? Nowadays, fascism is most popularly associated with Mussolini’s Italy between the years 1922 to 1943, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany between the years 1933 to 1945. However, making Nazism synonymous with fascism would be a mistake: fascism has spawned into many forms, and although they share similar features, different nations have customized fascism to a point of significant differentiation. Between 1922 and 1945, fascist parties arose throughout the world. They included the Fatherland Front, led by Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, the Falange founded by Jose Antonio Primo in Spain, the Cross of Fire, renamed the French Social Party led by Colonel Francois de La Rocque, the Gentile National Socialist Movement and the South Africa Fascists, both in South Africa, the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, and the military dictatorship of Admiral Tojo Hideki in Japan (RoSo, 2002). Even Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascist states - allied Axis forces in World War II – were far from identical. Up to and including the year 2002 fascist states and groups continue to exist all over the world. This makes fascism all the more intriguing to study, as unlike Communism, for example, it has no distinct author of one ideological abstraction. There was no Karl Marx of fascism, who exported his theories worldwide. Instead, fascism seems to be a condition that states let themselves fall into, and then upon which they fervently cling. Fascism grows up from out of the ground and is incubated in each nation individually: consequently, the ingredients are the same but the flavor is unique. This phenomenon occurs because fascism, for as long as it has been known, is rightly considered an ideology of negatives. For example, it is vehemently anti-Marxist, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal.
This makes it difficult to define what exactly is “pure” fascism. Its origins hav...