(ELI5) what actually is a facist
In: Other
You’re growing a daisy in your garden that you think is the perfect, best daisy in the world. You love it so much and care about that daisy deeply.
Even though the garden is absolutely huge and there is plenty of space for lots of different kinds of flowers to be enjoyed by lots of different kinds of people, you start to feel very anxious and scared that the mere presence of these other flowers somehow interfere with the “cleanness” of your perfect, best daisy. You deal with this anxiety by digging up all the flowers to stop them polluting what you see as perfect. You’re left with a garden of identical perfect daisies. Any other flower that starts to grow gets dug up immediately.
Faschist are group of people who want to use the police to stop things that they consider to be harmfull to the state, nation and leader. They usually have a strong leader who chooses what these harmfull things are.
Historically fascist laws have targeted foreigners, social and religious minorities. Fascist also attack those who protect these groups.
To understand fascism, you first need to understand nationalism, the idea that countries should be founded by a single lingually unified group of humans. Nationalist promote this nation state idea, and fascist use violence to promote it.
It’s hard to say because the meaning of words changes through time and through use. Barbie made a good joke on this. “She called me a fascist! I don’t even control the railways or the flow of commerce”. It’s a good joke, that points out the disparity between the common, if overeager use of the word today and the strict encyclopedic definition that Barbie knows.
Fascism as a movement and ideology developed and bloomed in a different period, and while the word today persists few people actually use it to describe what would actually be considered fascist if we’re going to be pedantic. It’s a catch all for conservative or authoritarian people that someone doesn’t like.
A fascist in the modern sense is generally someone who believes they know how to fix the world by installing a government that has complete control and follows certain specific, and strict, values, which goes against the principle of personal freedom. Fascists don’t mind having no freedom because in their ideal world people don’t need freedom, they need to conform to their own moral and societal guidelines, and that a world like that would be ideal for them. So basically it’s someone who wants to enforce their belief system by force with no regard to different points of view or personal freedom.
The word had lost its more specific meaning related to particular intricacies of how it was implemented and defined in the past.
Trying to define Fascism is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. – Ian Kershaw
Anti-Liberal, Autocratic, authoritarian, collective greater than individual, political suppression using violence, heavy state economic intervention
Again, depending on your own political leanings, the actual definition gets foggy.
The above listed are unarguable core semantics, however.
OP, none of the answers here are correct as of this post. Fascism is actually a kind of complex topic because understanding its causes and identifying features means unlearning a lot of conventional wisdom about politics. Fascism works by playing on people’s shifting fears and prejudices and a simplified view of the world that doesn’t sound much different from the common worldview.
These are the books that scholars studying fascism learn from and while they are certainly above ELI5 level, they are important for understanding the topic:
*The Anatomy of Fascism* by Robert Paxton
*The Origins of Totalitarianism* by Hannah Arendt
*Imagined Communities* by Benedict Anderson
For more current authors talking about Fascism (though Paxton is still alive and active), I recommend Cas Mudde, Jan Werner-Mueller, and John Judis. Their works on modern populism and its ties to the revival of Fascism are good to know.
Getting the important stuff out of the way, the best accurate ELI5 of Fascism is that it is fundamentally an aesthetic artistic movement that wants to use society itself as an artistic medium to mold into their romantic ideal of beauty. This romantic ideal is usually (but not necessarily) masculine, militaristic, and ethnically homogenous. Fascists want to make their country look and feel like their favorite works of art and exclude everything that doesn’t fit. This necessarily results in not treating humans as people, but as a clay that they can mold into their vision. They are necessarily politically conservative and typically share aesthetic preferences with religious institutions that they use to siphon off and radicalize their membership. They use a charismatic leader to serve as a voice of the movement (the leader is not *in control* of the movement, but can influence it). This “charismatic” leader is often a wealthy man who is not particularly intelligent or traditionally charismatic, but repeats the talking points of the crowd and because of his wealth offers a vision that someone like them can also be successful if the movement achieves its aesthetic goals.
This is a woefully incomplete definition and I highly recommend reading the above books to understand the subject better.
I strongly recommend you watch this youtube video: [FASCISM: An In-Depth Explanation](https://youtu.be/1T_98uT1IZs?si=gIvjsr5gzOFBUTa5)
You don’t need to get on board with his conclusions wholesale, or at all, but the sort of reflection he is engaging in will be necessary to not get led astray on this topic.
Fascism is a highly politicized word. Do not accept clean definitions or narratives that don’t embrace (or even acknowledge) their limitations front and center. This goes regardless of source or intent of the provider.
Why is it so common to misspell fascist?
Even those trying to give a proper definition can’t seem to spell it correctly.
Go look up what Palingenetic Ultranationalisn is, as well as Umberto Eco’s 14 points. Some might argue that they aren’t that good, but I’ll let you learn about them and decide for yourself. I’m sure you can guess what i think of them. You might also just go read what Fascists over the years have written and get it straight from the horses mouth. Just try not to be too upset when you compare it all to a lot of popular politics today.
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The central themes of fascism seem to be a.) a belief that “strength” is what matters most. b.) that strength in must be service to what makes the nation/empire strong (Mussolini’s quote of “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” is particularly chilling).
The organizing principle can be different for different kinds of fascism (the Nazis organized it around “Aryan greatness”, modern Russia and fascist Italy around “Imperial greatness”).
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