Sometimes, notoriously with Trump, there is room for argument whether "fascism" is the right word. At other times, not.
Lu voted last Sunday in the Spanish Euro-election. In Spain, it is by national PR with party lists, in rank order and non-amendable. The electoral administration prints the lists and sets them out in 34 neat piles on a table. The voter picks one and puts it in the envelope supplied. I assume there was a curtained alcove for privacy, but nobody seemed to to bother with this. With nothing to do, I idly peered at a few lists. Among the many no-hopers, I spotted one from the "Falange Española de las J.O.N.S."
This has exactly the same name as the 1934 Falange, after it swallowed up the likeminded “Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista”. In other words, true-black fascists. Using the identical pre-Franco name strongly indicates that the ideology is unchanged too. These are people who think that Franco didn’t go far enough in murdering communists, separatists and anarchists, and some probably believe that he betrayed their martyred leader by turning down a prisoner exchange. It’s as if Nigel Farage were to campaign in Clacton under the party label and flag of Mosley´s “British Union of Fascists”. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Flag_of_the_British_Union_of_Fascists.svg/1200px-Flag_of_the_British_Union_of_Fascists.svg.png
The falangists got 9,643 votes in all of Spain, or 0.06%, just ahead of Spanish Food Sovereignty, and under half “none of the above”. You have to ask how they got round the requirement or 15,000 signatures to field a list. The loophole is that you can replace these by a mere 50 signatures of elected officials, including local councillors. These can only sign one no-hoper petition, but there are a lot of them. If you want to worry about the falangists, it’s that there are apparently 50 serving town councillors in Spain willing to play with fire for a bad joke.
PS: are there any of Mosley´s British fascists alive today? The BUF was dissolved in 1940. Suppose that up to the end it was admitting new members. Let’s say the age cutoff was 15 years old. Any such recruits would be at least 99 today. Demographically it looks possible that there are centenarian British fascists still alive.
But centenarians tend to be people who make sensible lifestyle choices, avoiding booze, ciggies and motorbikes, getting married, exercising, not volunteering in crises for particularly dangerous jobs and missions like paratrooper, bomb disposal, front-line ambulance driver, etc. This does not at all fit the profile of our hypothetical teenage fascist, a reckless nihilist. I think the original British fascists are all gone.
Unless you define fascism with specific reference to the period 1920-45, Trump is definitely a fascist. Oddly, though, the most clearly fascist parties in Europe today aren't those with historical links to 1920-45 fascism, but newish parties that started out as hard neoliberals (Fidesz, AfD). And it's easy to see the UK Tories going the same way.
I wouldn't say that the far right has abandoned nationalism on all issues. Gender issues, in particular, vary quite a bit across far right jurisdictions. The Polish far-right is anti-abortion. The English far right is anti-trans. The Hungarian far right is pro-natalism in the usual creepy right-wing way. Hungarians and Serbs are irredentist; French, Italians and Austrians are not. The English far right is terrified of white European migrants; most other far rights are not. Etc.
Immigration and anti-democracy are unifying themes. But otherwise, the European far right is a gorgeous mosaic of, uh, turds.
I didn’t mean to claim that they had identical, something that’s most obvious in relation to views on Russia. Rather, I’m saying that (for example) Hungarian pro-natalism isn’t specifically about the need for more Hungarian babies - it’s about the need for more white babies
The Venn diagrams here are a sprawl. Even the canonical prewar far-right movements had large differences, and the NSDAP and the Falange did not SFIK refer to themselves as "fascist". More important, neither the Falange nor the Italian fascists attached much importance to racial purity and anti-semitism, central tenets of the German Nazis. They all clearly recognised a close kinship and formed strong political alliances against both democracy and communism. Hitler even declared war on the USA sua sponte after Pearl Harbour, a colossal, war-losing mistake, out of ideological affinity with Japanese militarists. Moving on to the current crowd of Trumpist far-rightists, where do you find the uniformed paramilitary militias, protectionism, statist economic policies, xenophobic and militarist nationalism, and buzzphrase socialist rhetoric of their 1930s predecessors? Or where can you find in prewar fascism any sympathy for privatisation of state enterprises, or idolization of the free capitalist market? "Fascism" as a general category was mainly the invention of its communist and socialist enemies, sound enough given the real common features of the 1930s far right movements, and self-identification by some. I don't myself find it very helpful today. "Trumpism" will do fine.
Sometimes, notoriously with Trump, there is room for argument whether "fascism" is the right word. At other times, not.
Lu voted last Sunday in the Spanish Euro-election. In Spain, it is by national PR with party lists, in rank order and non-amendable. The electoral administration prints the lists and sets them out in 34 neat piles on a table. The voter picks one and puts it in the envelope supplied. I assume there was a curtained alcove for privacy, but nobody seemed to to bother with this. With nothing to do, I idly peered at a few lists. Among the many no-hopers, I spotted one from the "Falange Española de las J.O.N.S."
This has exactly the same name as the 1934 Falange, after it swallowed up the likeminded “Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista”. In other words, true-black fascists. Using the identical pre-Franco name strongly indicates that the ideology is unchanged too. These are people who think that Franco didn’t go far enough in murdering communists, separatists and anarchists, and some probably believe that he betrayed their martyred leader by turning down a prisoner exchange. It’s as if Nigel Farage were to campaign in Clacton under the party label and flag of Mosley´s “British Union of Fascists”. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Flag_of_the_British_Union_of_Fascists.svg/1200px-Flag_of_the_British_Union_of_Fascists.svg.png
The falangists got 9,643 votes in all of Spain, or 0.06%, just ahead of Spanish Food Sovereignty, and under half “none of the above”. You have to ask how they got round the requirement or 15,000 signatures to field a list. The loophole is that you can replace these by a mere 50 signatures of elected officials, including local councillors. These can only sign one no-hoper petition, but there are a lot of them. If you want to worry about the falangists, it’s that there are apparently 50 serving town councillors in Spain willing to play with fire for a bad joke.
PS: are there any of Mosley´s British fascists alive today? The BUF was dissolved in 1940. Suppose that up to the end it was admitting new members. Let’s say the age cutoff was 15 years old. Any such recruits would be at least 99 today. Demographically it looks possible that there are centenarian British fascists still alive.
But centenarians tend to be people who make sensible lifestyle choices, avoiding booze, ciggies and motorbikes, getting married, exercising, not volunteering in crises for particularly dangerous jobs and missions like paratrooper, bomb disposal, front-line ambulance driver, etc. This does not at all fit the profile of our hypothetical teenage fascist, a reckless nihilist. I think the original British fascists are all gone.
Unless you define fascism with specific reference to the period 1920-45, Trump is definitely a fascist. Oddly, though, the most clearly fascist parties in Europe today aren't those with historical links to 1920-45 fascism, but newish parties that started out as hard neoliberals (Fidesz, AfD). And it's easy to see the UK Tories going the same way.
I wouldn't say that the far right has abandoned nationalism on all issues. Gender issues, in particular, vary quite a bit across far right jurisdictions. The Polish far-right is anti-abortion. The English far right is anti-trans. The Hungarian far right is pro-natalism in the usual creepy right-wing way. Hungarians and Serbs are irredentist; French, Italians and Austrians are not. The English far right is terrified of white European migrants; most other far rights are not. Etc.
Immigration and anti-democracy are unifying themes. But otherwise, the European far right is a gorgeous mosaic of, uh, turds.
I didn’t mean to claim that they had identical, something that’s most obvious in relation to views on Russia. Rather, I’m saying that (for example) Hungarian pro-natalism isn’t specifically about the need for more Hungarian babies - it’s about the need for more white babies
The Venn diagrams here are a sprawl. Even the canonical prewar far-right movements had large differences, and the NSDAP and the Falange did not SFIK refer to themselves as "fascist". More important, neither the Falange nor the Italian fascists attached much importance to racial purity and anti-semitism, central tenets of the German Nazis. They all clearly recognised a close kinship and formed strong political alliances against both democracy and communism. Hitler even declared war on the USA sua sponte after Pearl Harbour, a colossal, war-losing mistake, out of ideological affinity with Japanese militarists. Moving on to the current crowd of Trumpist far-rightists, where do you find the uniformed paramilitary militias, protectionism, statist economic policies, xenophobic and militarist nationalism, and buzzphrase socialist rhetoric of their 1930s predecessors? Or where can you find in prewar fascism any sympathy for privatisation of state enterprises, or idolization of the free capitalist market? "Fascism" as a general category was mainly the invention of its communist and socialist enemies, sound enough given the real common features of the 1930s far right movements, and self-identification by some. I don't myself find it very helpful today. "Trumpism" will do fine.