Dan Snow's History Hit - What is a Fascist?

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

This is everything you ever wanted to know about fascism. Are the British government's new proposals to stop refugee boats arriving fascistic? Were the 2021 insurrectionists at the Capitol building fascists? Is Muslim persecution in India today fascism in action? They're certainly attacks on democracy but can they accurately be described as fascism?Dan puts that question to a world-leading expert in today's episode, Roger Griffin, Emeritus Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. They get into the deep history of fascism's origins, and the true definitions of terms like 'authoritarian' and 'populism' and look to distinguish the difference between the technical meaning of fascism and the colloquial term we tend to invoke in daily conversation.Produced by James Hickmann and edited Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're at it again. We're calling each other fascists. Is it fascist to incite and then celebrate an insurrection at the US Capitol? Is it fascist to speak out to try and interdict small boats of refugees and migrants coming to the UK? Is it fascist to invade eastern Ukraine or clamp down on Muslim civil rights in India? Well, we're going to get into it. Roger Griffin is an emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University. He is the world's leading expert on the historical, the ideological dynamics of fascism, the toponomy of fascism. And he joined me at short notice after one of Britain's best-known TV presenters, a former England football, soccer captain,

Gary Lineker, spoke out against government immigration policies last week and was temporarily suspended from his duties at the BBC. He said those policies were reminiscent of the language used in the 1930s. And that led to another upsurge of historians, people wringing their hands, talking about those historical parallels, and thinking about fascism, what it meant when it started, and what it still means today. So here is everything you ever wanted to know about fascism. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Roger, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Of all the political brands ever launched, this has to be one of the most durable. Everyone's always calling each other fascists. Who were the first fascists? It gets actually quite complicated. The fascisti, it basically just means people belonging to a fascia.

Now, one of the great misapprehensions in history, and it goes into history books as well, is that the fascists named themselves after what was called, rather confusingly, the lictus rod, which is the symbol of authority in ancient Rome, which is those sticks bound around an axe head. It's called il fascis in Rome, and it became the symbol of the fascist party. But it's a sort of pun, because fascia originally just meant a league or a group. And when there were people trying to push Italy into the First World War, they were called interventionists in 1913, 1914. And then into 1915, when war was brewing and into the First

World War, they were called interventionists. And so you had several interventionist fascists, one of which was founded by Mussolini himself. And it was a fascio of revolutionary action or something vague. So the very first fascisti were the members of the interventionist league and nothing actually to do with what became known as fascism, except that when he founded his first real fascio after the war in Milan, he formed it specifically to be a veteran organization, which is why it was called il fascio di combattimento, which means the fascist war veterans, basically. And the spirit of these frontline fighters, combatentismo, was what he wanted to inject into what he saw as a weak Italian democracy to form the basis of a new Italy, which would be based on what he called the trenchocracy, the aristocracy

of the trenches. And they would come back from the war, all tanked up with courage and patriotism, and they would be the force that would revitalize Italy and create a new Italy. So very soon after the formation of the first fascio in Milan in March 1919, the centennial was a couple of years ago, you got people referring to the members of his movement as fascisti. They're the sort of authentic fascists. And some historians are pedantic enough to say you can't really use the word fascism outside that context, that there are no fascists outside Italy.

Since then, the word has spread like thin marmite all over the place. And you mentioned they were trench veterans. We would describe them, would we, as right wing, or were they more ambiguous? I mean, they didn't like committees and they didn't like sort of shilly-shallying around. They wanted results and they were men of action. They wanted action, yeah. This is the key idea. The Risorgimento, the unification of Italy process, had created a situation where Italy was geographically united,

but as Count D'Azeglio famously said, we have made Italy, but now we have to make Italians. And one of the great critiques of the intelligentsia in Italy, right through to the First World War and beyond, was that there were all these people in Italy who were illiterate and couldn't speak the standard language. They spoke dialect, and they didn't even know they were in Italy. And there needed to be a galvanizing event. And this was seen by the far left as a syndicalist communist revolution, especially after the Russian Revolution in 1917. And it was seen by the far right as a national revolution. To confuse things further, there was a group called National Syndicalists, but let's not go there. let's not go there. Now, was it a right-wing movement? Well, that's a very interesting one. Don't forget Mussolini started off his life as a revisionist communist, a bit like Lenin. He came to the conclusion you couldn't have a global revolution, but you could have an Italian one,

socialism in one country. And it would be carried out not through the creation of a proletariat, because that was almost as off the cards as it was in Russia, but through will, through action. off the cards as it was in Russia, but through will, through action. So you had the idea of a national revolution. And in a famous article of 1917, he wrote in his own newspaper, where he talks about the trenchocracy, he says that the ideology that may save Italy after the war might be a form of national socialism. Now, he says that with a small n, small s, but he came from the left. And the original program of the original fascio, it's called the Fascism of Sansepolcro, which is the name of the square where there was the theater where fascism was founded, was actually quite left wing and about female rights and about getting rid of

the monarchy and getting rid of the church and everything else. And it was a sort of fusion of left and right. And in fact, all the way through to the end of the first fascist regime, because there were two, fascism contained a sort of national left-wing element, which is parallel to what the Nazis claimed about what they were doing with Germany, which was a socialism for Germans, a national socialism. They didn't like the man, right? So big capitalist enterprises. That's the bit that, am I right, that when people argue about this left-right split within fascism, is that important? The interesting parallel is that both the far right and the far left criticised international capitalism. We know very well that Nazism

criticized international capitalism as part of the Jewish plot against humanity, and that's allowed them to have the double think whereby Jews were both the embodiment of Marxism and of capitalism. For nationalists in the interwar period, cosmopolitan international capitalism was what was dissolving the nation. And of course, after the big depression in 1929, which a bit like COVID was meant to come from China, depression, economic collapse came from America. And therefore, American capitalism and international capitalism was held to be a dangerous force. I mean, Hitler wanted to get rid of department stores because they were both Jewish and chains and big capital. And the far Hitler wanted to get rid of department stores because they were both Jewish and chains and big capital.

And the far left wanted to get rid of capitalism as well, but to get rid of the entire system. So why do we come to think then of fascists as right wing? Is it that the nationalism has sort of obscured the sort of leftist, very small socialist beginnings and inspirations? I mean, the nationalism, the militarism, and the authoritarianism come to sort of dominate, do they? Well, I put it slightly differently. I mean, if you study the history of ideas and the history of ideologies, you quite easily start reaching for the metaphor of a sort of DNA. If you look at how you got to Marxism and how you got to nationalism, they actually come from two different genetic histories, if you like.

I mean, biological metaphors are dangerous because the Nazis use them about Jews, etc. But nevertheless, radical Marxism originally comes from a left-wing libertarian strand of ideology, which overthrew the absolutist monarchy in France. And when the bourgeois revolution, to put it in Marxist terms, failed in France, you then got people who said, look, we've just got a new aristocracy now, and they're called bourgeois. We need to get rid of those as well. And there was still the goal of equality, fraternity, and freedom, you know, the great battle cry of the French Revolution. I mean, we do a whole history on that., but basically Marxism grows out of an attempt to get back to a more radical version of the values of the French Revolution. So that was from the left, etc., which is broadly speaking called liberal nationalism. But already during the Napoleonic Wars, you've got very unhealthy forms of nationalism, which were racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic. And these nationalisms had no interest at all in getting rid of class divisions or social inequality, as the left did. They just wanted a

strong nation. So you get a situation where, for example, Hitler's socialism, if you like, respected the work of workers. He talked about an alliance of the intellectual and physical work, but there was no intention at all of creating material equality, whereas Marxism still wants to have some sort of ultimate dream, a classless society with no actual property at all. Don't forget that socialism is a transitional phase towards Marxism. So if you start looking closely at what nationalists and the left say about equality and classlessness, they're very, very different versions of the same myth. very different versions of the same myth. So let's come back to the Italian and then German fascism. Did they initially try to create a synthesis between those two very different traditions? No, no. Right. So why do we remember fascism as right wing? And what happens to those kind of leftist ambitions within it? Well, it's complicated because fascism and

Nazism are so difficult. Fascism in Italy grows out of somebody who's actually moved from communism to nationalism. He starts very quickly with his fasci going for, especially because of what's beautifully called in Italian, the mutilated victory. This is a phrase from a guy called Danunzio, that the Allies ratted on what they promised Italy at the end of the First World War. So there was a genuine sense that they'd lost all these hundreds of thousands of men, but with nothing from the international community. And you started to get these nationalist fantasies about having an Italian Adriatic and having bits of Yugoslavia and making Italy great again, the sort of Trumpist rhetoric. And what really injected into Italian fascism, what we now recognize to be right-wing nationalism is the Roman myth. I mean, there's not very much Marxist about the Roman Empire. And once the rhetoric of Italian fascism started being that of creating modern Romans, and once they started trying to gain an empire,

and the classic bit, of course, was Ethiopia, then by the late 20s, 30s, the only trace of socialism is the idea of there being a very large dose of what we now see as a welfare state. fascism was basically socially engineered to create more babies. And that meant better health and maternity clinics and demographic policies, etc, which sort of look left wing, but it's really for nationalist purposes, exactly the same thing in Germany. So I suppose the task for somebody coming in from outside is to distinguish between policies that look very similar, but we actually come from a different ideological history. Reminds me of Bismarck in the late 19th century, kind of trying to fatten up the German race and get them ready for... Nazism promised to emancipate the German worker from capitalism,

from cosmopolitanism, from international finance, etc., etc., and give the workers respect and to be part of a classist society in the sense that the idea of class was replaced by the idea of community. And this is where you really get your definition of fascist nationalism from, the idea of creating a national community. All fascists, British fascists, French fascists, etc., have a fantasy of creating a nation which is revitalized, which is totally inclusive, and in being totally inclusive about the people who fit, it excludes alien elements, moral, even biological, that don't fit, and therefore makes everybody share in this great new reborn nation. And therefore, in a way, class and exploitation

is replaced by the idea of everybody working towards everything in a community. So it's a sort of parody of some sort of communist society, but it's a national communism in that sense, and it has no pretense to equal out society materially. You're listening to Dan Snow's history here, talking about fascism. More coming up, maybe. March 2023 marks 20 years since the start of the Iraq War.

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Could the Secretary of State legally order British forces into Iraq? And could British forces follow that law? And how did ISIS rise from the destruction left behind? But ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the US invasion of Iraq. Join me, James Patton Rogers, on the Warfare podcast from History Hit as we look back on one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history. I'm Matt Lewis.

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when people are using the word fascist today it sounds to me like the thing that we are looking back in particular on from the 1920s and 30s is actually not uncommon within history which is leaders trying to sell a myth trying to make their country great again, insert country, militarising, overseas territorial conquest, and crushing internal dissent. Is this just what happens when mad narcissists get given the levers of power? So what we've got to do here is distinguish between two very different ways of using the word fascist. One is as a technical term of political science in what's called taxonomy, in classifying a political phenomenon. You create your criteria, and then you ask, does the behaviour or ideology of this movement or this leader satisfy the definition of fascism, which may sound rather boring and technical, but that's the task of historians and political scientists. But the word fascism has become released from the ivory tower and now

flows around as a slower word, an expletive, a pejorative word, a way of putting people down. Anybody who reminds you of authoritarianism, dogmatism, fanaticism. You even get phrases like health freak or fashion freak or fashion fascist, health fascist. My parents are fascist in inverted commas, etc, etc. This is using the word which has come out of the context where it's called technically by people who study semantics, a floating signifier. It can actually float around and be applied to all sorts of things. Weirdly enough, it's been used within the history of communism to discredit forms of the party line, which were dismissed by the center. So for example, it's used under Maoism, it's been used in Russia, etc., to discredit forms of the party dogma, which the person in power didn't want. So by that time,

fascism just meant people trying to impose their values on you. And unfortunately, that term coexists with its use within political science. Right. And people trying to impose their values on you to exclude other groups, to try and create kind of ideological conformity, to invade other countries. That's as old as the hills. Well, absolutely. And that's why it makes sense. Some adjectives just have a sort of therapeutic value. They're cathartic. I mean, if you get to Calais and somebody starts questioning whether your wife can come into the country because there's a stamp missing in a passport,

it comes out of the subconscious to think he's a fascist. In that context, it's obviously not a technical context. So what I'm trying to say is that there's a technical use of the term and a colloquial use of the word. And if we're going to start writing articles about Trump or Putin being a fascist, we have to be very careful to distinguish between the explicit and cathartic use of the term and the technical use of the term. Do you get angry about the cathartic use of the term and the technical use of the term. Do you get angry about the cathartic use of the term? I feel the term welling up in me in various confrontations with bureaucracy. I thought you were about to say now, Roger. You feel it welling up in you.

It makes me laugh because I can still feel myself. I mean, it gets to a point where I sort of double think about it, but it's still there as a colloquialism to use. But I've built my career on trying to sharpen up its usage in academic context so that we don't just fling it around for any form of authoritarianism or populism. So is fascism serving a useful purpose or is its ambiguity now too dangerous? We have got democratic backsliding, Modi, Orban, Putin's, Trump. In that context, how should we feel about the use of that word? It's a powerful word. Does it alert people or is it losing its any kind of power because of its reproduction?

It's become a semantically blunt word. It's a blunt tool to express negative emotions. I'm quite happy for people to call anything they want, really, unless they're actually provoking illiberal behavior or whatever. But if we get into its use in human sciences, we have to be careful. If people don't quite know what a virus is and they call everything a virus and it's not technically a virus, it doesn't really matter outside, but it does matter if it's your GP.

Now, me, as somebody who's lived a life on the margins of academia, I gave myself this rather weird task, probably requiring a psychoanalyst's insight to actually try to give the term a precise, it's called a heuristic value. That means a discriminatory value when you use it to distinguish between different types of movement. And I do think it matters because if you get headlines in quality newspapers saying fascism is on the rise, you want to know what's on the rise. And if it's just being used as a loose term for right-wing behaviour or racism or loss of liberal values, then that is a very different statement from a statement that evokes memories of the interwar period and the rise of Nazism. Do you share the concern that in India, in Indonesia, in Hungary, in the US, in parts of Europe, there has been threats to liberal democracy? And have we got another adjective we can use? Oh, absolutely. We've got a lot of adjectives. I mean, it's a bit like if you say Portuguese

man-in-war is a jellyfish and you get stung by one, it doesn't really matter that it's not technically a jellyfish. It does if your life is to do with preserving jellyfish. I mean, it's really worth looking up, but they're not jellyfish. They're colonies of organisms which actually swim along together. It's not even an it, it's a them. And that is fascinating in its own right. But if you're on a beach and you're stung by a Portuguese man-at-war, nobody's going to pedantically tell you not to use that term. But if we're going to start talking seriously about threats to liberal democracy, the reason why we need a conceptual toolkit is because if we lump them all together and then call

them fascists, then if we're trying to combat them, then we might be reacting inappropriately to them because there are different ways of fending off the danger they pose. Now, I've had some success in this. I pioneered a definition of fascism, which put emphasis on a particular aspect of Italian fascism and then showed that it was a major feature of Nazism and, interestingly enough, of movements that called themselves fascists, like the British Union of Fascists. And what they all have in common, to the exclusion of other forms of right, is that they are revolutionary forms of nationalism. They want to actually create a new order based on, quite often, a very racist form of nationalism.

So, Mosley wanted a new order. He didn't want to just be a democratic politician. Modi and Trump have no intention of destroying the constitution and creating a new order. They may pervert the constitution. They may actually get rid of the liberal dimension of liberal democracy and de-liberalize democracy. You get Viktor Orban in Hungary actually proudly affirming that Hungary is now an illiberal democracy. He's actually quite bright there because that's exactly what he's done. But it's not a fascist state. And I think if anybody's been to Hungary now, I mean, if you are not one of the minorities who are discriminated against, it's a perfectly modern part of the EU. So it matters whether we call a country like Modi's

Hindu party, radical party, fascist or not. And it also matters whether we call a country like Modi's Hindu party, radical party, fascist or not. And it also matters whether we call ISIS a form of Islamofascism, which is a term that's been used. Because if we're trying to tackle it at the level of counterterrorism or counter-radicalization, we have to know what we're dealing with. As somebody who works in this period of history that for some reason seems to be most people's historical hinterland, from where they seize for all their metaphors and parallels and inspirations and things to avoid, how useful is it that we say, well, a language about immigrants reminds us of the 1930s? What's your response to that?

Well, in order to make what I consider personally a valid moral point, Lineker actually grabbed an allusion to history, which is historically inaccurate. The misuse, the abuse of language under the Third Reich by the Nazi party to demonize and dehumanize all sorts of groups, including Jews, was actually part of a very different sort of regime with a very different purpose than unfortunate policies within the Conservative Party in modern Great Britain. There's no literal parallel with the language, even if it's reminiscent of, but that makes it so vague. It's really part of a slurring. Having said that, I don't think it matters if somebody is making a valid moral point if they get their history wrong. But I think it's really important, for example, if Putin was a fascist, he would want to destroy the existing Russian constitution, which is still nominally democratic, and replace it with a new order. That's exactly what Hitler, he got himself into

parliament to do it. But that's exactly what he set out to do. What Mosley wanted to do, it's what Mussolini did on the 1st of January 1925, when he declared parliamentary democracy dead. Putin has no intention of creating a new order. He's dangerous because he's actually not driven by a coherent ideology, which would allow us to really anticipate what he's trying to do. Because he wasn't a fascist, and he didn't speak or act exactly like a fascist, but like somebody who wanted to abuse the Constitution to increase his own power, the West misread his master plan that he partly fulfilled by occupying the Crimea and backed off from stemming the rise of Putinism in Russia. So there are times when our accurate use of terms actually allows appropriate foreign

policies to be adopted, military policies to be adopted. And so what I call for is just a much more flexible, nuanced use of political terms by journalists and academics, much more dialogue between academics and journalists when they're reporting on things, which is a bit utopian. But certainly at the level of military intelligence and foreign policy, a much greater insight into the risks to liberal democracy. It's not enough to have a liberal democracy just to have elections. You really do have to have a commitment to fundamental liberal principles. And insidiously, populism is all over the world now and is creating contaminations of liberal democracy,

which I regard far more dangerous than the rise of fascism. I think the age of fascism is dead, but the rise of illiberal democracy is very much alive. Okay, last very quick question, Roger. I'd never have a good answer for this. What is your definition of populism? Okay, well, highly contested. All isms are contested. Basically, I use it with a modifying adjective like right wing. There's right wing populism, radical right wing populism. Right wing populism is a xenophobic version of democracy. It's actually illiberal in spirit and ethos in the way it demonizes outgroups, etc. But it's still operating within

constitutional democracy. Radical right-wing populism is far, far closer to a fascist agenda. And there is a spectrum, we have to keep in mind a spectrum of politics. There's also left-wing populism. So the next time you hit the word populism, you have to ask yourself, is this left wing or right wing? And how close is it to actually wanting to throw out constitutional democracy and actually let in fascism through the back door? And if you take the alternative for Germany, it's a broad spectrum. But on the far right of the alternative for Germany, you actually had neo-Nazis who were trying to use the AFD as a way of installing themselves within liberal democracy in Germany. Roger Griffin, thank you very much indeed for coming on and clarifying all of this. Thank you very much indeed for the chance to waffle on about it. See you.