Personal Statement on Umberto Eco's Literature Work About Fascism
I read the book Ur-Fascism, it's really amazing as a reader can know the power of words in literature. It's trully a masterpiece that I want to discuss in this Umberto Eco fascism essay as for me it's Umberto Eco's greatest work!
Eco did this in a very interesting way, forcing the reader to read in his framework, because his introduction was so big, there were 20 pages at the beginning, and I skipped as I do in some of the books that I have read. This book has shaped my general understanding of Fascism as it was based around a strong will to increase national strength by any means - an authoritarian, totalitarian framework with a mass of people readily adhering to a single figure or race. Maybe naively, and through its historical weight, I would consider it a pejorative term of historic movements of brutality immediately drawing a connection to Nazism.
Umberto's Ur-Fascism highlights a much more complex ideology which seems convoluted and unbound by clear definition, it embraces a myriad of contradictory elements. “A fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas” may be explanatory of why it became a catch-all idea of diverse authoritarian movements, but Eco draws an understanding of its emotional foundations. Arguing it isn’t a freestanding ideology that came and went but a recurring phenomenon planted in human psyche and emotion seemed initially more idealised and spurious of the fascist mindset to be universal, but challenged preconceptions of a heavily politically and economically charged ideology as more appealing through collaborative and spiritual practices. Perhaps more persuasively was the idea that it was much more pliant and much more applicable to society over time, rather than looking at fascism of the past with aspersion or indignation, Ur-Fascism “is still around us… under the most innocent of disguises”. The array of tendencies of fascist regimes that Eco outlines - fear of difference, appeal to the middle class, elitism and nationalism - sees the same focus in Trump’s United States or Bashar Al-Assad’s Syria, a world that isn’t so historic or distant.
In conclusion, 'Ur-Fascism' is a powerful essay that offers a deep understanding of the nature of fascism and its enduring appeal. Eco's analysis of the characteristics of fascism provides a framework for identifying and resisting its emergence, and his warning against the dangers of complacency remains as relevant today as it was when the essay was first published.
