Hello everybody and welcome back to a new episode of ideology explained.
Today we are learning about fascism.
Fascism is a very fluid ideology which makes this a hard video to make, so feel free to
tell me what I got wrong in the comments.
That being said let’s get started.
Fascism first crystalized under Mussolini in Italy after the first world war.
The word Fascism comes from the lati word fasces which means “bundle of sticks”.
The idea is that a single stick breaks easily but a bundle is strong.
You may have heard about that metaphor before.
It’s not exclusively fascist.
You can find bundle of sticks imagery from before fascism as well.
Among other things in the American senate.
Italian fascism took power under Mussolini, and German fascism then took power under Hitler.
There are more rulers who are commonly called fascist like Franko in Spain as well as many
of the south and central American dictatorships which were propped up by the USA during the
cold war like Pinochet, the guy from the helicopter meme.
There were Japanese and Chinese fascists during the interwar period as well.
As you may have noticed there are many governments which were called fascist over time.
This makes it kind of hard to define what fascism itself is.
There are even modern-day figures who are called fascist and they usually respond by
saying that they are not fascists.
I will now attempt to explain fascism, just keep in mind that it’s a fluid concept and
there will be people in the comments yelling at me.
Fascism is a cluster property.
That means it has some features which are commonly associated and collectively called
fascism but not all fascism has to have all these properties.
Another example of a cluster property is the word “health”.
Being healthy includes different things like having a beating heart, breathing regularly,
not having a mental illness, good hearing, not having any broken bones and so on.
All of those are part of the cluster property of health.
But you don’t have to fulfil all of those for people to call you healthy.
For example if you had a mental illness and when I went to your ear nose throat doctor
in preparation for voice training the doctor call you fully healthy even if you had a massive
personality disorder.
That means a cluster property is not a check list.
You don’t have to fulfil all of those criteria to be healthy.
And likewise, fascism is a cluster of properties.
And now I will tell you those properties.
There are classically 14 signs of fascism: Powerful and continuing nationalism.
This comes in different forms.
In Nazism this was a form of German supremacy while in fascist japan it was mainly anti-imperialist.
The core of this is that there is an in-group which is seen as better or more important
than the out-group.
Disdain for human rights.
This is about wanting to treat the members of the out-group as if they weren’t human
at all.
That means torture, unjust imprisonment, random mass killings and so on.
Identification of enemies as a unifying cause.
This means that the driving thing unifying a fascist society or party is the out group.
Over time many minorities have been seen as the out-group of fascist societies.
For example, Communists, Jews, Poles, Mexicans, Muslims, LGBT people and so on.
Supremacy of the military.
The military is a core part of fascism because it is seen as a tool for the in-group to defeat
the out-group.
Rampant sexism.
Fascism is essentially conservative and hence doesn’t have a progressive view on women
or other non-male genders.
Controlled mass media.
This is about securing the power of the ruling party.
And so is: Obsession with national security.
This is often times a distraction from real problems.
A way to divert public attention over the border instead of at the local problems.
Religion and government intertwined.
Again, fascism is essentially conservative which often makes it religious.
Corporate power protected and Labor power suppressed this is a complicated one to explain.
Essentially fascism is often times held up by the capitalist class who in term get’s
their power protected and the power of their workers reduced.
I have a video on that.
Disdain for intellectuals & the arts, Obsession with crime & punishment, Rampant cronyism
& corruption and Fraudulent elections.
That last one can also mean a literal dictatorship like in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
So those are the signs.
The properties fascism can have.
Remember, it’s not a check list.
You don’t have to fulfil all of those to be fascist.
So that’s how you recognise fascism.
But as an ideology, what is it about?
Well, as I’ve explained before an ideology is basically just a way to pick and choose
which facts are politically relevant to you and to arrange them in a way to explain the
present and possibly predict the future.
Fascism basically is the story of a group, usually a racial or national group which is
superior to all others but is somehow prevented from showing or living out their greatness.
And the reason for that is the out group.
To use a concrete example let’s look at the nazis.
They said their people were superior to all other people but that they couldn’t live
up to their greatness because they were a victim of a jewish plot to somehow hurt germany.
And they said that all germany had to do was to beat the other nations in war, which would
be super easy because they thought they were superior, and to get rid of the Jews and then
germany would take it’s place as superpower.
Obviously there are problems with this.
For example the fact that this jewish plot to hurt germany wasn’t a thing.
They just lost the first world war because they sucked.
And germany was not superior which is exemplified by the fact that they lost the war.
And even the part that germany would be great without jewish people is wrong.
There are barely any jewish people in germany nowadays and germany is still not this superior
nation state the fascists said it would be.
Fascism as an ideology is ultimately very bad at explaining things.
If you ask a fascist, why the economy collapsed in 2008 they will say it was the Jews.
If you ask them why the Iraq war started they will blame the Jews.
None of which there is any convincing evidence for.
Fascism as an ideology does not work for explaining the things an ideology is supposed to explain.
This sets it apart from other ideologies like Marxism or neoliberalism which at least offer
explanations that are supported by some facts.
I guess what I am saying is that fascism is a way to trick people instead of an ideology
that helps us understand the world.
And furthermore I made a video on why I think that.
You could watch that one after this one.
That’s about all I had to say.
Thanks for watching.
Did you know that YouTube hates video about fascism?
They always get demonetized.
Luckily I don’t put ads on my videos in the first place.
I 100% rely on patrons to give me an incentive to keep making videos.
That’s why I always thank my patrons at the end of my videos.
And I especially thank: Alki, Darius the Berd, Noah, Hikaru, Hurdington gurdington, Jenarchist
77, Joie, Morally Conflicted Tortoise, Tyler Dang, klarstrup and Trey