In 2025 fascist movments meeting the literal definition go to great pains to reject the label. Was there an equivalent with early 20th century fascism? A tradition or movement with bad PR that the fascists reject despite fitting the criteria?
In 2025 fascist movments meeting the literal definition go to great pains to reject the label. Was there an equivalent with early 20th century fascism? A tradition or movement with bad PR that the fascists reject despite fitting the criteria?
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We actually teach that as a unit in British schools. There was actually a lot of political resistance to the Nazis but they couldn’t really agree with each other. While the Nazis were the largest party they only got about 40 percent of the vote in a proportionally represented system.
Problem was the remaining sixty percent couldn’t come to an agreement who the chancellor should be, and an established politician called von papen, on the verge of being ousted as chancellor made a deal to retain some of his power. This is the deal that saw Hitler take the job though was actually with president Hindenburg. They thought they could box him in between the president and vice chancellor.
We also look at a few youth movements. In our case the swing kids and edelweiss pirates. The swing kids listened to illegal music and made ways to copy records in secret and formed banned clubs to discuss political ideas, while the edelweiss pirates was basically the anarchist version of Hitler youth. Sadly neither group had the machines of state to support them so their weren’t able to grow very easily.
I can’t talk about Italy or Germany, but this phenomenon where similar movements were labelled by half of the political spectrum as “fascist”, but vigorously rejected the label, was most certainly a thing.
In France the half-dozen ‘patriotic leagues’ (far-right nationalist militias dedicated to overthrowing the democratic regime), and in Spain equivalent militant far-right parties like Renovación Española or Falange, ferociously rejected being called fascist. Why? Because as ultranationalists they hated the idea of being ‘imitations’ of some foreign phenomenon; they always sought to insist on being a homegrown political movement with deep roots representing the ‘true nation’, and that it was actually groups like socialists, communists, democrats and liberals were the recent ‘foreign’ imports. And as nationalists, different 1930s far-right movements often hated foreign nations – a French or an Austrian fascist was suspicious of a German Nazi’s brand of expansionist nationalism (not to mention the Nazi’s ṕaganism compared to the former two’s clericalism). In fact, it was even a debate at the time on whether the Italian Fascist Party and the German NSDAP were really two incarnations of one single ideology.
Of course, it’s not quite so simple, as each political ideology at the time had its own definition of what constituted a fascist, simply because it was such a new phenomenon that few could agree what exactly the ‘checklist’ contained. If you were a centrist liberal, any group that used violence and rejected democracy, including communists; if you were a communist, then your definition was usually based on capitalism plus imperialism plus militarism, so included 50% of the political spectrum.
But one useful metric is to look at what all these parties/militias considered their friends abroad, in the worldwide fight against the Communist International. And that way, you can in fact connect groups with similar ideology (mutatis mutandis), political style and method, through common connections. Even if it’s not ideal – but as one political philosopher of the time said on this subject: anything real is complex.