Cre­ative Com­mons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the Nation­al Archives in Hol­land

One of the key ques­tions fac­ing both jour­nal­ists and loy­al oppo­si­tions these days is how do we stay hon­est as euphemisms and triv­i­al­iza­tions take over the dis­course? Can we use words like “fas­cism,” for exam­ple, with fideli­ty to the mean­ing of that word in world his­to­ry? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expres­sion fas­cist pig, writes Umber­to Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fas­cism,” “used by Amer­i­can rad­i­cals thir­ty years lat­er to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smok­ing habits.” In the for­ties, on the oth­er hand, the fight against fas­cism was a “moral duty for every good Amer­i­can.” (And every good Eng­lish­man and French par­ti­san, he might have added.)

Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fas­cist regime, which “was cer­tain­ly a dic­ta­tor­ship, but it was not total­ly total­i­tar­i­an, not because of its mild­ness but rather because of the philo­soph­i­cal weak­ness of its ide­ol­o­gy. Con­trary to com­mon opin­ion, fas­cism in Italy had no spe­cial phi­los­o­phy.” It did, how­ev­er, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influ­en­tial, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benet­ton, or Ver­sace would ever be.” The dark humor of the com­ment indi­cates a crit­i­cal con­sen­sus about fas­cism. As a form of extreme nation­al­ism, it ulti­mate­ly takes on the con­tours of what­ev­er nation­al cul­ture pro­duces it.

It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al man­i­fes­ta­tions of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, across Europe and even South Amer­i­ca. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dic­ta­tor­ship that took over a Euro­pean coun­try,” and got to name the polit­i­cal sys­tem. But Eco is per­plexed “why the word fas­cism became a synec­doche, that is, a word that could be used for dif­fer­ent total­i­tar­i­an move­ments.” For one thing, he writes, fas­cism was “a fuzzy total­i­tar­i­an­ism, a col­lage of dif­fer­ent philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal ideas, a bee­hive of con­tra­dic­tions.”

While Eco is firm in claim­ing “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fas­cist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qual­i­ties of what he calls “Ur-Fas­cism, or Eter­nal Fas­cism” down to 14 “typ­i­cal” fea­tures. “These fea­tures,” writes the nov­el­ist and semi­oti­cian, “can­not be orga­nized into a sys­tem; many of them con­tra­dict each oth­er, and are also typ­i­cal of oth­er kinds of despo­tism or fanati­cism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fas­cism to coag­u­late around it.”

1. The cult of tra­di­tion. “One has only to look at the syl­labus of every fas­cist move­ment to find the major tra­di­tion­al­ist thinkers. The Nazi gno­sis was nour­ished by tra­di­tion­al­ist, syn­cretis­tic, occult ele­ments.”
2. The rejec­tion of mod­ernism. “The Enlight­en­ment, the Age of Rea­son, is seen as the begin­ning of mod­ern deprav­i­ty. In this sense Ur-Fas­cism can be defined as irra­tional­ism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beau­ti­ful in itself, it must be tak­en before, or with­out, any pre­vi­ous reflec­tion. Think­ing is a form of emas­cu­la­tion.”
4. Dis­agree­ment is trea­son. “The crit­i­cal spir­it makes dis­tinc­tions, and to dis­tin­guish is a sign of mod­ernism. In mod­ern cul­ture the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty prais­es dis­agree­ment as a way to improve knowl­edge.”
5. Fear of dif­fer­ence. “The first appeal of a fas­cist or pre­ma­ture­ly fas­cist move­ment is an appeal against the intrud­ers. Thus Ur-Fas­cism is racist by def­i­n­i­tion.”
6. Appeal to social frus­tra­tion. “One of the most typ­i­cal fea­tures of the his­tor­i­cal fas­cism was the appeal to a frus­trat­ed mid­dle class, a class suf­fer­ing from an eco­nom­ic cri­sis or feel­ings of polit­i­cal humil­i­a­tion, and fright­ened by the pres­sure of low­er social groups.”
7. The obses­sion with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fas­cist psy­chol­o­gy there is the obses­sion with a plot, pos­si­bly an inter­na­tion­al one. The fol­low­ers must feel besieged.”
8. The ene­my is both strong and weak. “By a con­tin­u­ous shift­ing of rhetor­i­cal focus, the ene­mies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Paci­fism is traf­fick­ing with the ene­my. “For Ur-Fas­cism there is no strug­gle for life but, rather, life is lived for strug­gle.”
10. Con­tempt for the weak. “Elit­ism is a typ­i­cal aspect of any reac­tionary ide­ol­o­gy.”
11. Every­body is edu­cat­ed to become a hero. “In Ur-Fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy, hero­ism is the norm. This cult of hero­ism is strict­ly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machis­mo and weapon­ry. “Machis­mo implies both dis­dain for women and intol­er­ance and con­dem­na­tion of non­stan­dard sex­u­al habits, from chasti­ty to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.”
13. Selec­tive pop­ulism. “There is in our future a TV or Inter­net pop­ulism, in which the emo­tion­al response of a select­ed group of cit­i­zens can be pre­sent­ed and accept­ed as the Voice of the Peo­ple.”
14. Ur-Fas­cism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fas­cist school­books made use of an impov­er­ished vocab­u­lary, and an ele­men­tary syn­tax, in order to lim­it the instru­ments for com­plex and crit­i­cal rea­son­ing.”

One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unre­marked is his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the Ital­ian oppo­si­tion move­men­t’s unlike­ly coali­tions. The Resis­tance includ­ed Com­mu­nists who “exploit­ed the Resis­tance as if it were their per­son­al prop­er­ty,” and lead­ers like Eco’s child­hood hero Franchi, “so strong­ly anti-Com­mu­nist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a spe­cif­ic fea­ture of an Ital­ian resis­tance, one not observ­able across the num­ber of nations that have resist­ed total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments. As for the seem­ing total lack of com­mon inter­est between these par­ties, Eco sim­ply says, “Who cares?… Lib­er­a­tion was a com­mon deed for peo­ple of dif­fer­ent col­ors.”

Read Eco’s essay at The New York Review of Books. There he elab­o­rates on each ele­ment of fas­cism at greater length. And sup­port NYRB by becom­ing a sub­scriber.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

Wal­ter Ben­jamin Explains How Fas­cism Uses Mass Media to Turn Pol­i­tics Into Spec­ta­cle (1935)

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der