Fascism And Its Evolvement: The World Post World War II
The term fascism was derived from the Italian “fascio”, and is synonymous with militant brotherhood. Fascism began in the year 1919, under Mussolini’s leadership. His reign was influenced by ethnocentric ideology and values. Fascist society was very combative, soldierly, and war-like. Fascists believe in a society where the most powerful rule. Thus, they have complete distain for democracy, elected officials, and anything that resembles liberal thoughts or ideologies. Fascism is more than a political philosophy. It encompasses political operations with a well thought out plan, that is often led by a despot, or a totalitarian. This cultivated nationalistic and war-like passions. In Italy, for example, the fascist party completely took over all of Italy’s government and culture. Furthermore, Mussolini as ruler of Italy during World War II collaborated with other totalitarian powers such as Hitler during the reign of Nazi Germany. World War I and its aftermath increased the population’s distrust of various governments throughout Europe. This opened the door to the possibilities of other types of governments. One such type was socialism. Socialism was not satisfactory to the governments that were in power and the monied aristocrats within these countries. This allowed fascism to gain traction.
The leaders of Germany & Italy granted fascists the ability to rule their countries. They did this because their traditional system of more than party government had failed. A great deal of Germans and Italians were anxious about the culture and future of their countries. During World War I these people had been assured that that their countries would be triumphant and excel with greatness, but this did not happen. Fascism gave people the ability to belong and identify with a group. This made them feel less betrayed, and more secure as citizens. Yet, being part of the group came with a great cost. Fascists squashed the rights of individuals.. Fascists and their followers thought that the group’s goals, and purposes are much more important than human beings personal freedoms. They jailed those they thought were antagonists because they did not want ideas that went again their principles to grow within the country. The fascists allowed for unlimited police power and national aggression in the names of national solidarity. Violence was common place.
The Blackshirt Militia (1922) were known as “strong-armed squads” fought against socialism by fighting socialist farm organizations, occupied socialist towns and raided socialist newspapers. Propaganda, half truths, twisted truths or untruths were used by Fascist leaders to accomplish their goals. This propaganda was often cloaked under the intention of extreme nationalism but racial purity was often the desired end underneath the cloak. World War I and its aftermath increased the population’s distrust of various governments throughout Europe. This opened the door to the possibilities of other types of governments. One such type was socialism. Socialism was not satisfactory to the governments that were in power and the monied aristocrats within these countries. This allowed fascism to gain traction. The leaders of Germany & Italy granted fascists the ability to rule their countries. They did this because their traditional system of more than party government had failed. A great deal of Germans and Italians were anxious about the culture and future of their countries. During World War I these people had been assured that that their countries would be triumphant and excel with greatness, but this did not happen.
Fascism gave people the ability to belong and identify with a group. This made them feel less betrayed, and more secure as citizens. Yet, being part of the group came with a great cost. Fascists squashed the rights of individuals. Fascists and their followers thought that the group’s goals, and purposes are much more important than human beings personal freedoms. They jailed those they thought were antagonists because they did not want ideas that went again their principles to grow within the country. The fascists allowed for unlimited police power and national aggression in the names of national solidarity. Violence was common place. The Blackshirt Militia (1922) were known as “strong-armed squads” fought against socialism by fighting socialist farm organizations, occupied socialist towns and raided socialist newspapers. Propaganda, half truths, twisted truths or untruths were used by Fascist leaders to accomplish their goals. This propaganda was often cloaked under the intention of extreme nationalism but racial purity was often the desired end underneath the cloak. After World War II, fascism was forbidden in Italy and in West Germany. In post World War ll there was zero ability for Fascists to take over political and governmental leadership. Yet many countries and regions of the world still had fascist motivated parties and groups that were developing based on fascist beliefs. These included Europe, Latin America, South Africa, The Middle East, and the United States.
Many of these factions were covert. In Austria during 1999-2000 the Freedom Party of Austria, which is a far right wing party had electoral success. The Freedom Party of Austria was founded in the mid-1950’s. The influx of immigrants was seen by Haider and his supporters as green light to amp up the propaganda against immigrants. It showed immigrants in disparaging ways. This party fostered and used fear to generate nationalistic pride that really was based in xenophobia and hatred. This created contention, animosity, and protests in Austria and in other countries because the leadership of the party and Jorg Haider were thought to be aligned with Nazi doctrine. Haider while arguing for more stringent controls on immigration or “over-foreignization” used the terminology, ‘Uberfremdung’ that Joseph Goebbels had used while he was Hitler’s minister of propaganda. Haider in March 1999 became the governor of Carinthia his home province. His government was faced with boycotts by travelers looking to tour Austria.
More directly and dramatically his government faced demonstrations and diplomatic protest from those opposed to Haider and the Freedom Party of Austria. Within Austria, Haider’s Freedom Party, received twenty-seven percent of the vote nationally. Before Haider died on October 10, 2008, Haider and Heinz Christian Strache, a protege of Haider, formed a right wing block. This block did well in Austrian’s general elections which took place in September of 2008 and gained the same total votes as the Social Democrats. Strache as the leader of the Freedom Party of Austria has called for a Ministry of Deportation to be setup, and mocked homosexuals. He has been seen in forests carrying weapons while wearing paramilitary fatigues while in the company of banned German neo Nazi’s. In May of this year, Strache was forced to resign after a video was leaked showing Strache drunk, fantasizing about woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch counting piles of illegally gotten campaign money, firing unfriendly journalists and turning his country into a Russian funded autocracy.
Sebastian Kurz has been utilizing anti-foreigner and anti- European Union rhetoric of the Freedom Party of Austria. He has polished up his Fascist points of view with new slick marketing and language aimed at new generation that do not have the sense of history and personal responsibility that their elders had. In 2019, Kurz, 33 years old, won the as the country’s youngest Chancellor and his political party Austrian People’s Party received more than thirty-seven percent of the vote. Neo-Fascism in France was controlled in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by the National Front (FN) which was founded in 1972 by Francois Duprat and Francois Brigneau. They campaigned using the slogan “France for the French” as their Fascist predecessors had in the 1930’s. They blamed the high rates of unemployment and increased crime on immigrants much like Haider later did in Austria. By doing so they FN increased their political support from one percent in the 1981 election to fourteen percent in the 1988 election. The FN leadership’s anti-immigration stance included the notion that non-French immigrants, in particular Muslims, threatened French national identity, culture, and way of life. This type of is disinformation and indoctrination is commonly used by Fascist parties, groups and governments.
When propaganda is most powerful and effective, it is based upon fears that many citizens have regarding their countries identity, jobs, money, and their futures and capitalizes on their emotions. Furthermore, films, music and television shows which came from the United States in great numbers were also responsible for watering down the French distinctiveness and character. The FN called for a return to the ethical values of traditional family life, hard work, patriotism, law and order, and claimed that these beliefs were disintegrating due to permissive liberal ideas and multiculturalism. Wherever the FN had the ability, they imposed censorship. Cities that fell under the jurisdiction of FN had their mayors remove left-wing articles, journals and books from the public libraries. They even went so far as to forbid librarians from ordering books that could be deemed “internationalist”. They required all new materials back the FN’s policies. The mayor of Toulon, Jean-Marie Le Chevallier took on more extreme measures when he canceled awarding a literary prize to a Jewish writer and tried to shut down a well-known performance festival in the city because of its leftist political orientation.
The FN’s positions on economic issues shifted during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the 19980’s the FN joined with conservatives who wanted individually owned businesses as opposed to government interference in the economy. But, during the 1990’s the base of the FN enlarged and changed. It not only included small business owners and self employed artisans but also included unemployed people who were made up of blue and white collar employees, social conservative Catholics and younger people. In 1991- 1992 Serbian paramilitary members and units of the Yugoslavian army were violently involved in ethnic cleansing with the intent of driving out non- Serbian masses in northeastern Croatia and parts of northern and eastern Bosnia. The goal was establishing in name primarily independent Serb republics. This was a direct result of the fall of communism in what was then known as Yugoslavia and the dissension of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This region of the world was now ripe for the rise of fascism.
These attacks included mass executions, forced marches, starvation, uncomprehensible brutality, starvation and system wide rapes were compared to the torture and mercilessness of the Nazi invasions of Eastern Europe and Russia. The purpose of these attacks was to create ethic hatred that was permanent and would prevent the development of multiethnic states in the areas that were being targeted. The Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic organized and directed the militaristic and torturous movements to boost his image of a fierce and proud nationalist. Further Milosevic wanted to gain power at the expense of Vojislav Seselj’s who ran the Serbian Radical Party which was the largest neofascist party in Serbia. In early 1998 Serbian military along with their police forces started attacking Kosovo. In particular these attacks were on the areas of Kosovo where the Kososvo Liberation Army (KLA) was said to be entrenched.
The KLA was comprised of Albanians that were fighting to end control of this territory. Serbian military and other forces presided over ethnic cleansing in which there were enormous massacres of civilians.This admire then 850,000 Kosovars to move onto the borders of Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania. During the same time period, Dobroslav Paraga was the leader of neofascism in Croatia. Paraga founded in 1990 the Croatian Party of Rights or Hrvatska Stranka Prava (HSP). He vehemently believed in order for Croatia to survive they would have to deal with Serbia and the threats that loomed over them. To become victorious over Sebia he wanted to create the “Greater Croatia”. According to Paraga, “Greater. Croatia” would include most of Serbia, and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Paraga’s supporters approved the pro-Nazi Ustasa regime. During World War ll the Ustasa exterminated Serbs, Jews, Gypsies in Croatia.HSP members wore black shirts as the former UStasa paramilitary had.They gave fascist salutes and said the old Ustasa slogan “Ready for the homeland”. Outside of Europe fascism was also entrenched. Latin American countries had seen neoFascism grow.
Juan Peron ruled Argentina from 1946-55 and in 1973-74 as the elected president. However, in he 1930’s he served as Argentina’s military attache to Italy. Accordingly, Peron said “Mussolini was the greatest man of our century, but he committed certain disastrous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his errors”. Peron idolized Mussolini and wanted to model his government after his. Interestingly Peron garnered the support across a wide spectrum of society. He had won the support of poor industrial workers which were own as the “descamisados” or the “shirtless ones” as well as wealth entrepreneurs. He not only stood for higher wages but also for industrial development. Middle class nationalists and army officers backed him too. In 1975 violence escalated in Argentina. Kidnappings and assassinations of business and government leaders were rampant. These acts of violence were being performed by leftist guerrillas.
The military and the secret police retaliation on a wider plain. In the late 1890’s, many white Australians founded an all white socialist paradise in Paraguay. Interestingly, it became refuge for Nazi’s seeking keep their Aryan dream alive fifty years later. These Nazi’s seeking refuge in Paraguay were aided by Alfredo Stroessner who was a martinet of Paraguay from the 1950’s until he was forced out in the late 1980’s. He was known as little Hitler and also known to demonic. In Chile there had been a history of Prussian/German influences on the military. This meant that there were great similarities between Europe’s fascist and those in Chile. Further, Fascism in Latin America grew out of already established racial rankings and pecking orders. This can be seen in the work of Latin American writers who grew up in the 1970’s and after, while the “southern Cone” dictators were in power. These writers emit and emote differently then the writers before them because the grew up during ultimate time of fascist influences.
In South Africa the most important neofascist group after the year 1945 was called the South African Gentile National Socialist Movement. Its greatest success was in having the strongest political party, the National Party of South Africa incorporate white supremacy and apartheid. This official system of apartheid in place the government was controlled by the white minority population. Segregation of housing, education and practically all areas of ones life was controlled according the governments definition of races. The white controlled apartheid government purposefully opted to construct three race or ‘nations’ They were one of white, one of blacks and a third which was made up of mixed race people referred to as ‘coloureds”. To control the black and the mind race people the invoked a law of sabotage. Sabotage was defined as any illegal action that was done with the intent and purpose of furthering economic and political changes. Since almost every political activity or action became illegal Africans or blacks could be accused of sabotage very easily. The African had tp be able to prove they were innocent of the charge of wanting to bring about political or economic change.
In the Middle East Muammar al- Qaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq were considered neofascist. Qaddafi was know to have been a charismatic dictator and devout Muslim. He came to power in 1969 during a military coup. He desired his “true democracy” in which his government had ownership of important parts of the economy, government controlled labor unions.He also advocated for strict adherence to Islamic law. He was a war criminal during the Libyan civil war and note for starving Misrata’s population and he forbad fuel and other services from entering that city. In Iraq, Hussein’s Ba’ the movements embraced an fierce type of nationalist socialism and rejected western liberalism as “materialistic communism”. He came to power in in coup in 1968. He was known a dictator based upon an Arab version of Fuhrerprinzip. His atrocities are many and the exact number may never be known. Estimates range as high as half million.
There is evidence of more ten 250 mass graves that were created and utilized during his reign. In many ways he emulated Hitler and his the many deaths that he sanctioned are too great to list. However one example is when “Ayatollah Muhammed al-Sadr, father of prominent Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and two of his sons were assassinated in 1999. Al-Sadr was a well-liked Shiite leader, and his death spawned Shiite uprisings in Baghdad. As he had previously, Saddam cracked down on the rebellion and hundreds were killed”. Neofascism in the United States, was first identified in the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The Ku Klux Klan started as a white supremacist organization approximately at ehe end of the Civil War. It was resurrected in 1915. It has displayed some fascist traits. It believes certain types of whites are not only better, smarter but are also suited to run this country. It displays xenophobia.
Some the of the southern states during the 1960’s, saw an uptick in the KK’s activates as civi-rights workers were trying to get make Southern States and neighborhoods comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Additionally, since the 2016 election there have been allegations that Trump’s campaign has had elements of fascism. Donald Trump, during his campaign had he propensity to blame America’s decline on internal and external enemies of the United States. He has guaranteed actions with great force without adherence to the principles of our process. He has arrived in dramatic fashion by airplane to campaign which was a strategy that Hitler invented. His ability to get crowds going with words like”Lock her!” And the chanting of such phrases all demonstrate signs of fascism. On the other hand, his desire for radical deregulation is quite opposite of the usual desires of fascist.
