This week, David Horowitz and his band of degenerate murderers, religious extremists, and fear-mongering terrorists are polluting the country with their special brand of racism and hatred that we have come to expect from right-wing Bush sycophants. These religious persecutors, war-criminals, and lackeys continue on their project to destroy America from within, while murdering as many brown-skinned people as possible along the way. All who dare not bend automatically to their sick will to power and their destiny to destroy are fair game. Not only the religion of Islam, but the international community, its rule of law, and its respect for human rights are also in the cross-hairs of these sick, demented brown-shirted bastards.
In honor of the Great Professor Horowitz, and to counter-balance his campaign to infect the world with his ignorance, I proclaim this Bushismo-Fascism Awareness Week and will present a series of diaries that describe Bushism and its basis in fascistic ideology.
Previous Diaries
Bush Authoritarianism as 'fascism in motion'
Bushismo-Fascism Awareness Week
I. Introduction
Today marks the second day of Bushismo-Fascism Awareness Week series of diaries at Daily Kos. The purpose of this series is to place Bushism within the continuum of ideologies as tending towards—or, of achieving—the fascistic end of the ideological continuum. Today, we discuss Emilio Gentile and comments from his book, The Origins of Fascist Ideology: 1918-1925, and one of his essay's "Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism".
II. Definitions
There are three definitions from the book that form the foundation of this diary: The first is Gentile’s definition, taken from the preface, of the main tenets of a fascistic ideology, once it took hold in Italy in the years 1921-1925:
A nationalist and revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist political movement with a social base mostly within the middle class; organized as a ‘party militia’; having, a totalitarian vision of politics and of the State, and an ideology based on myth, virilist, and hedonist, sacralized as a political religion affirming the primacy of the nation seen as an ethnically homogeneous organic community, that is organized hierarchically into a corporate State; belligerently advocating a policy of grandeur, power and conquest aimed at creating a new order and a new supranational civilization.
Looking back from the present time, i.e., post-Nazism, Gentile modifies this definition slightly:
In fascism we face a brutal and openly proclaimed aversion to freedom, equality, happiness and peace as life's ideals; we are confronted with obedience of the masses, the sacrifice of the individual to the collective understood as the State and the nation. The fascists never claimed to want to spread freedom and rationality to the world. They proclaimed that reason counted for little in politics where only force, the will to power by select minorities, the consensus created by myth and faith, really do count.
The other is Gentile’s definition of Totalitarianism:
An experiment in political domination undertaken by a revolutionary movement, with an integralist conception of politics, that aspires toward a monopoly of power and that, after having secured power, whether by legal or illegal means, destroys or transforms the previous regime and constructs a new State based on a single-party regime, with the chief objective of conquering society; that is, it seeks the subordination, integration and homogenizations of the governed on the basis of the integral politicization of existence, whether collective or individual, interpreted according to the categories, the myths and the values of a palingenetic ideology, institutionalized in the form of a political religion, aiming to shape the individual and the masses through an anthropological revolution in order to regenerate the human being and create a new man, dedicated in body and soul to the realization of the revolutionary and imperialistic policies of the totalitarian party, whose ultimate goal is to create a new civilization beyond the Nation-State.
His ‘purposely long’ definition is meant to show the phenomenon is interconnected, and none of the parts can be looked at alone. He also stresses that he sees totalitarianism as an ‘experiment’ rather than as a ‘regime’. This adds to the temporal component of any analysis of fascism, as I pointed out in the previous diary where we discussed Paxton and the dynamic process towards fascism, or, in this case, the dynamism of totalitarianism.
In Gentile's paper from his presentation "Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism", we see Gentile expanding the definiton:
a) coercion, imposed through violence. Repression and terror are considered as legitimate instruments for the affirmation, defence and diffusion of the prevailing ideology and political system;
b) demagoguery exerted through constant and all pervasive propaganda, the mobilisation of enthusiasm, the liturgical celebration of the cult of the party and the leader;
c) capillary organisation of the masses, that involves men and women of all ages, in order to carry out the conquest of society and a collective indoctrination;
d) totalitarian pedagogy, carried out at high level, and according to male and female role models developed along the principles and values of a palingenetic ideology;
e) discrimination against the outsider, undertaken by way of coercive measures, that range from exile from public life to physical elimination of all human beings who, because of their ideas, social conditions and ethnic background are considered inevitable enemies, because they are regarded as undesirable by the society of the elect and, duly, incompatible with the objectives of the totalitarian experiment. [Gentile's emphasis in original].
The next step in Gentile's analysis is using this definition of totalitarianism in developing a significant timeless, i.e., unburdened by a historical context, framework.
Totalitarianism, I believe, is the fundamental and essential element to define fascism, for the construction of an "ideal type" that may be a useful instrument for the conceptual organization of historiographic research data. The "ideal type", in the sense intended by Max Weber, is without doubt a useful means to orient historical research and to conceptually organize its results, but only on condition of not losing sight of the instrumental and artificial character of such constructions, avoiding giving them the substantiality of a historical phenomenon.
To clarify, Gentile develops an organizational realm, a cultural realm, and an institutional realm. These are discussed fully in the essay, and I take the following from the introductory portion:
The Organizational Realm
a mass movement, with interclass aggregation but in which, in the military and directional cadres, young middle class generation new to political
activity are organized in a militia party, that bases its identity not on social hierarchy and class origin but on sense of comradeship and which invests itself with a mission of national regeneration and considers itself to be in state of war against political adversaries and aims at acquiring the monopoly of political power, using terror, parliamentary tactics and the compromise with the leading class to create a new regime, destroying parliamentary democracy
The Cultural Realm
an anti-ideological and pragmatic ideology that proclaims to be antimaterialist, antiindividualist, antiliberal, antidemocratic, antimarxist, tendentially populist and anticapitalistic. .... a culture based on the mythical thought and on the tragic and activistic sense of life, seen as manifestation of the will power, as the myth of youth creator of history, as warly model of life and collective organization; a totalitarian view of the primacy of politics, as integral experience and continuous revolution, to enact through the fascist State, the fusion of the individual and of the masses in the organic and mystic union of the nation, as racial and moral community, adopting measures of discrimination and persecution against those considered outsiders of this community, because enemies of the regime or because they belong to races considered either inferior or dangerous for the safety of the Nation; a civil ethics based on the absolute subordination of the citizen to the State, on the total dedication of the individual to the national community, to discipline, to virility, to comradeship, to warly spirit;
The Institutional Realm
a single party which covers the function of organ of the "continuous revolution", of providing for the armed defense of the regime, of choosing the directive cadres and of organizing the masses in the totalitarian State, making them part of a process, both emotional and fideistic, of permanent mobilization; a police apparatus, which prevents controls and suppresses, even appealing to terroristic measure, dissention, and opposition; a political system ordered in a hierarchy of functions, nominated from above and dominated by the figure of the "capo", invested with charismatic sacrality, who commands, directs, and coordinates the actions of the party, the regime, and the State; a corporate organization of the economy, which eliminates union liberty, enlarges the spheres of intervention of the State and aims at achieving, on the basis of technocratic and solidarity principles, the collaboration of the productive classes under the control of the regime, in order to reach its goal of power while preserving private property and class division; an imperialist foreign policy inspired by the myth of national grandeur and of the New Civilization, aiming at supranational expansion. [My emphasis throughout the three]
III. Discussion
As we continue to define Bushism as an ideology based on fascism, today's quotes lead us back to definitions. The first describes the fascistic ideology formed once Mussolini had his ideology firmly in place in Italy. Again, we look to the definition as a guide, understanding two main points: First, to identify an ideology as fascistic, the subject need not fit all the requirements of Mussolini's form; and, second, that there is a temporal, dynamic component to these definitions where one or more of the variables may be more or less relevant or consistent with the subject.
It is hoped that we are arriving at a clearer concept of what Bushism is, and how far we have come in the past six years towards living under the thumb of those who can be defined as tending towards, or having already arrived at, fascism.