Fascism

(left) and Adolf Hitler (right), two fascist leaders (pictured in 1937).]]

**Fascism** is a far-right form of government where most of the country's power is held by one ruler or a small group, under one political party. 

Fascist states are usually totalitarian one-party states. They prey on masses of angry, lonely and desperate individuals to make them unite behind a strong leader. This leader promises them a utopia and revenge on those who may have harmed them. 

Under fascism, the government heavily controls a country's economy and other parts of society, usually by using a form of authoritarian corporatism. Under this system, companies and workers are supposed to work together under national unity. A fascist regime uses violence to kill or persecute anyone it does not consider useful. 

The power of such totalitarianism comes from mass mobilization via the mechanism as mentioned, 

Mussolini wrote a paper called *The Doctrine of Fascism* in English. He started writing it in 1927, but it was only published in 1932. Most of it was probably written by Giovanni Gentile, an Italian philosopher who joined fascism and became an important influence. 

When Hitler came to power in Germany in the 1930s, he copied Mussolini. 

He became Italy's prime minister in 1922. In truth, Benito Mussolini had almost all the power in the country.

According to scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Mussolini believed democracy had failed. He had been a Socialist, but left the movement because he thought it was not strong enough, and it had refused to join the First World War. He believed democracy failed because of social class, and that it was too weak to stand against communism. Under fascism, he believed, people would focus on the nation, and they would cooperate for the good of the country without thinking about social class. 

Under Hitler's fascist Germany, the government blamed "Jewish communists", homosexuals, the disabled, Roma, and other groups for Germany's problems. Hitler's tyranny sent them to death camps to be killed.

### Robert Paxton 
American historian Robert Paxton summarized fascism's characteristics as follows:

# Desire to end democracy
# Purges and ethnic cleansing
# Aggressive foreign expansion
# Collaboration with established elites
# Compensatory cultures of unity, energy and purity
# Obsession with victimhood and community decline
# Mass-based party of committed nationalist militants
# Redemptive violence without legal or moral restraints

### Roger Griffin 
In 1991, British historian Roger Griffin proposed an alternative definition of fascism. He said fascism is a form of revolutionary nationalism hinged on the unity of a group to achieve a national rebirth (or *palingenesis*, Koine Greek: παλιγγενεσία), often by mistreating ethnic minorities. In 2003, Laurence W. Britt wrote the *14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism*:

# Fake elections
# Serious sexism
# Controlled mass media 
# Power of corporations protected
# Obsession with national security
# Rampant cronyism and corruption
# Religion and ruling elites tied together
# Obsession with crime and punishment 
# Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
# Disdain for the importance of human rights
# The supremacy of the military or avid militarism
# Powerful and continuous expressions of nationalism
# Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
# Identification of enemies or  to unite the population behind the ruler

## Critique
### Comparison to other forms of totalitarianism
One of the reasons fascism spread in the early 20th century was because the Russian Revolution had just happened and people were afraid of communism. Many landowners and business owners supported fascists because they were afraid of what would happen if the country became communist instead. 

In her work, *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951), Hannah Arendt compared National Socialism, Stalinism and Maoism. She wrote that these regimes were totalitarian, not fascist. 

In 1967, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas warned about a "left-wing fascism" of a protest movement in Germany of the 1960s, commonly known as Ausserparlametarische ("Extra-parliamentary") Opposition (APO).

## Opposition to fascism
There is more than one reason why people living in democratic states oppose fascism. The main reason is that in a Fascist government, the individual citizen doesn't always have the option to vote, nor do they have the option to be someone or to live a lifestyle which the fascists see as immoral, useless, or unproductive towards society. For example, LGBT people (like homosexual, cross-dressing, and transgender people) can be arrested and put on trial.

## Related pages
* Antisemitism in Europe
* Authoritarianism
* Extremism
* Islam and fascism
* Islamophobia
* Neo-Nazism
* Antiziganism

## References