It's a bit light on rigor than I hoped when I saw the title. It describes 3 fascist or near-fascist states that lost in recent history: Germany, Italy, Franco's Spain. But I wanted to know if Rome under Julius Caesar would be considered fascist? Alexander of Macedon? And also non-western states as well.
IMO it is less about fascism but wars of conquests that are more likely to be doomed to fail. Maybe fascism is a requirement for desires of conquest so they are tightly related.
For conquest to succeed it must be quick and overwhelming. Otherwise it becomes a war of attrition against an enemy that has way better motivation than your army. But also, even if you have a decisive victory, it is almost impossible to stop at just one victory because the war machine will be thirsty for more and your entire economy will be dependent on it, so you have to keep going until total failure.
fascist as in common parlance, e.g. brutal authoritarian dictators
but fascist in the original sense -- as created by mussolini -- was aggressive nationalism combined with corporatism, and a reclaiming of lost glory (revanchism)
george w bush's america is closer to classical fascism than stalin would ever be
Some of the features of Marxism Leninism may look like fascism when you step back and squint, but it's f-cked up in its own way. It's not even a far right versus far left thing. That's one of those neat symmetries that doesn't really apply.
I think this essay suffers from an attempt to define fascism so narrowly it only actually includes two countries - Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, who were both defeated by the same set of powers in the same war - while simultaneously stating that there's a specific quality of fascism - namely, an unwise focus on the signifiers of military strength rather than actual military strength - that is applicable to a bunch of other governments in other situations he classifies as near-fascist to avoid arguments over whether they are actually fascist or not.
I don't think he makes the case that an unwise focus on the signifiers rather than the reality of military strength primarily explains the defeat of either Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy in WWII. Did the Nazis and Italian fascists actually do this to a greater extent than any of the other participants of the war? Certainly every major participant in WWII had propaganda about how good its army was, including the United States and Britain ("videos" is anachronistic for the time period, but there's plenty of American WWII military propaganda that was originally a black and white filmstrip that's been digitized on YouTube). And every major participant in the war had a great deal of actual, non-fake, military strength. Fascist Italy was certainly a junior partner to the Nazis, but Nazi Germany was primarily defeated in the incredibly bloody Eastern Front, mostly by the armies of the Soviet Union expending huge amounts of blood and treasure in order to do it. It was not a trivial victory, nor I think an inevitable one.
The Soviet Union was an officially state socialist country, an ideology that saw itself as directly opposed to fascism. Particularly under Stalin, it can hardly be described as a country "willing to engage in potentially embarrassing self-study and soul-searching" - indeed Stalin's purges of large fractions of Soviet society in the 1930s, including the military, are a commonly-cited reason why the Nazis had so much success in the initial phases of the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Of course every allied power in the war was being supplied materially by the United States, which had an extremely favorable geographical position and cultural disposition to produce material goods. Maybe whichever side in the war the US supported would've won. Or maybe some third thing would've happened, WWII is one of the most well-studied conflicts in human history (and for good reason, it was a pretty important one!), there's lots of people with lots of ideas out there about how it could've gone differently than it did.
Looking beyond Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to other countries also weakens the argument. Let's say for the sake of argument that Franco's Spain counts as fascist. Then the fascists won the civil war, avoided fighting in WWII at all and thereby being destroyed like Nazi Germany was (although I think this was also not a foregone conclusion, and had more to do with the geopolitical calculus of the Allied Powers than anything Spain itself did at the time), and ended up surviving until Franco died of heart failure at the age of 82. At which point the country had a series of contentious-but-ultimately-peaceful political reforms resulting in its modern constitutional monarchy. This doesn't really sound like a narrative where a focus on the trappings rather than the reality of military ability resulted in a fascist nation fighting an aggressive war of choice and then losing! This might've just been Hitler specifically! (And it's not like that was the first time Germany did this sort of thing - was Kaiser Wilhelm II fascist? What about Otto von Bismark - the Franco-Prussian war went fairly well for Prussia and fairly badly for Napoleon III's France, actually, although maybe this is getting too far back in the past for labels like "fascist" to be useful).
If Salazar's Portugal was fascist, then doesn't the fact that it a...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] threadIt's a bit light on rigor than I hoped when I saw the title. It describes 3 fascist or near-fascist states that lost in recent history: Germany, Italy, Franco's Spain. But I wanted to know if Rome under Julius Caesar would be considered fascist? Alexander of Macedon? And also non-western states as well.
IMO it is less about fascism but wars of conquests that are more likely to be doomed to fail. Maybe fascism is a requirement for desires of conquest so they are tightly related.
For conquest to succeed it must be quick and overwhelming. Otherwise it becomes a war of attrition against an enemy that has way better motivation than your army. But also, even if you have a decisive victory, it is almost impossible to stop at just one victory because the war machine will be thirsty for more and your entire economy will be dependent on it, so you have to keep going until total failure.
he was, arguably, the only successful "true" fascist
but fascist in the original sense -- as created by mussolini -- was aggressive nationalism combined with corporatism, and a reclaiming of lost glory (revanchism)
george w bush's america is closer to classical fascism than stalin would ever be
Lasted longer than the Nazi empire, I'll admit, but both were weak
I don't think he makes the case that an unwise focus on the signifiers rather than the reality of military strength primarily explains the defeat of either Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy in WWII. Did the Nazis and Italian fascists actually do this to a greater extent than any of the other participants of the war? Certainly every major participant in WWII had propaganda about how good its army was, including the United States and Britain ("videos" is anachronistic for the time period, but there's plenty of American WWII military propaganda that was originally a black and white filmstrip that's been digitized on YouTube). And every major participant in the war had a great deal of actual, non-fake, military strength. Fascist Italy was certainly a junior partner to the Nazis, but Nazi Germany was primarily defeated in the incredibly bloody Eastern Front, mostly by the armies of the Soviet Union expending huge amounts of blood and treasure in order to do it. It was not a trivial victory, nor I think an inevitable one.
The Soviet Union was an officially state socialist country, an ideology that saw itself as directly opposed to fascism. Particularly under Stalin, it can hardly be described as a country "willing to engage in potentially embarrassing self-study and soul-searching" - indeed Stalin's purges of large fractions of Soviet society in the 1930s, including the military, are a commonly-cited reason why the Nazis had so much success in the initial phases of the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Of course every allied power in the war was being supplied materially by the United States, which had an extremely favorable geographical position and cultural disposition to produce material goods. Maybe whichever side in the war the US supported would've won. Or maybe some third thing would've happened, WWII is one of the most well-studied conflicts in human history (and for good reason, it was a pretty important one!), there's lots of people with lots of ideas out there about how it could've gone differently than it did.
Looking beyond Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to other countries also weakens the argument. Let's say for the sake of argument that Franco's Spain counts as fascist. Then the fascists won the civil war, avoided fighting in WWII at all and thereby being destroyed like Nazi Germany was (although I think this was also not a foregone conclusion, and had more to do with the geopolitical calculus of the Allied Powers than anything Spain itself did at the time), and ended up surviving until Franco died of heart failure at the age of 82. At which point the country had a series of contentious-but-ultimately-peaceful political reforms resulting in its modern constitutional monarchy. This doesn't really sound like a narrative where a focus on the trappings rather than the reality of military ability resulted in a fascist nation fighting an aggressive war of choice and then losing! This might've just been Hitler specifically! (And it's not like that was the first time Germany did this sort of thing - was Kaiser Wilhelm II fascist? What about Otto von Bismark - the Franco-Prussian war went fairly well for Prussia and fairly badly for Napoleon III's France, actually, although maybe this is getting too far back in the past for labels like "fascist" to be useful).
If Salazar's Portugal was fascist, then doesn't the fact that it a...